Claret and Olives, from the Garonne to the Rhone: Notes, social, picturesque, and legendary, by the way.Reach, Angus B. (Angus Bethune)
General
Claret and Olives, from the Garonne to the Rhone: Notes, social, picturesque, and legendary, by the way.
Reach, Angus B. (Angus Bethune)
Agriculture -- France; France -- Description and travel
jammed together dwellings; squalid, slatternly people buzzing about like
bees; bad smells permeating every street, lane, and alley; and now and
then the agglomeration of darksome dwellings clustering round a great
old church, with its vast Gothic portals, and, high up, its carven
pinnacles and grinning _goutieres_, catching the sunshine far above the
highest of these high-peaked roofs. This is the Bordeaux of the English
and the Gascons--the Bordeaux which has rung to the clash of armour--the
Bordeaux which was governed by a seneschal--the Bordeaux through whose
streets defiled,
"With many a cross-bearer before,
And many a spear behind,"
the christening procession of King Richard the Second.
We shall step into one church, and only one, that of the Feuillans.
There, upon a dark and massive pedestal, lies stretched the effigy of an
armed man. His hands are clasped, his vizor up shows his peaked beard,
and he is clad _cap-à-pied_ in steel. Who was the doughty warrior, thus
resting in his mail? Strange to say, no warrior at all; but the quietest
and most peaceable of God's beings. He had an odd, pedantic father, who
brought him up in strange Paganwise. The boy was never addressed but in
Latin. He never had a mother-tongue. He was surrounded with a blockade
of Latin speakers to keep afar off the profanation of French; he was
mentally fed upon the philosophers and the poets of old Rome, and taught
to weep for Seneca in the tub, as the nearest catastrophe which could
touch his sympathies. Furthermore, his father, out of respect for his
nerves, had him awakened every morning by the sound of soft music.
Happily, even this sublimity of pedantry and pedagoguism was
insufficient to ruin the native genius of Michael, Seigneur of
Montaigne, whose "essays ought to lie in every cottage window."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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