St. Ives: Being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England — John Shaqi
St. Ives: Being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in EnglandStevenson, Robert Louis
General
St. Ives: Being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England
Stevenson, Robert Louis
French -- England -- Fiction; Prisoners of war -- Fiction
honourable coat of a soldier; and remembered further back how many of the
noble, the fair, and the gracious had taken a delight to tend my
childhood. . . . But I must not recall these tender and sorrowful
memories twice; their place is further on, and I am now upon another
business. The perfidy of the Britannic Government stood nowhere more
openly confessed than in one particular of our discipline: that we were
shaved twice in the week. To a man who has loved all his life to be
fresh shaven, can a more irritating indignity be devised? Monday and
Thursday were the days. Take the Thursday, and conceive the picture I
must present by Sunday evening! And Saturday, which was almost as bad,
was the great day for visitors.
Those who came to our market were of all qualities, men and women, the
lean and the stout, the plain and the fairly pretty. Sure, if people at
all understood the power of beauty, there would be no prayers addressed
except to Venus; and the mere privilege of beholding a comely woman is
worth paying for. Our visitors, upon the whole, were not much to boast
of; and yet, sitting in a corner and very much ashamed of myself and my
absurd appearance, I have again and again tasted the finest, the rarest,
and the most ethereal pleasures in a glance of an eye that I should never
see again—and never wanted to. The flower of the hedgerow and the star
in heaven satisfy and delight us: how much more the look of that
exquisite being who was created to bear and rear, to madden and rejoice,
mankind!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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