"Breton" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his pursuer, Jones skirted the coast of Cape Breton, and put into the harbor of Canso, where he found three British fishing schooners lying at anchor. The inhabitants of the little fishing village were electrified to see the "Providence" cast anchor in the harbor, and, ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... of the Interior, by way of the Avenue de Marigny, with an escort of red-shirted Francs-tireurs de la Presse. The future Dictator had seven companions with him, all huddled inside or on the roof of a four-wheel cab, which was drawn by two Breton nags. I can still picture him alighting from the vehicle and, in the name of the Republic, ordering a chubby little Linesman, who was mounting guard at the gate of the Ministry, to have the said gate opened; and I can see the sleek and elderly concierge, who had bowed ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... the Roman Catholic Church in Newfoundland, was lying becalmed in his yacht one day in sight of Cape Breton Island, and began to dream of a plan for uniting his savage diocese to the mainland by a line of telegraph through the forest from St. John's to Cape Ray, and cables across the mouth of the St. Lawrence from Cape Ray to ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... enlightened citizens' or 'heirs to all the ages.' But suppose Sussex as silly as you like, the country wants a large preserve of fallow brains; you can't manure the intellect for close cropping. Isn't it Renan who attributes so much to solid Breton stupidity in his ancestors?" I notice that Mr. H. G. Wells, in his very interesting book, Mankind in the Making, is in support of this suggestion. The Idlehurst rector, in contrasting Londoners with Sussex folk, continues: "The Londoner has all his strength in the front line: one can never tell ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... that glowed in his Norseman's blood, all the headlong valour that spurred him over the slopes of Val-es-dunes, mingled that day with the coolness of head, the dogged perseverance, the inexhaustible faculty of resource which shone at Mortemer and Varaville. His Breton troops, entangled in the marshy ground on his left, broke in disorder, and as panic spread through the army a cry arose that the Duke was slain. William tore off his helmet; "I live," he shouted, "and by God's help I will conquer yet." ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... attempting on the morning when this history begins, to make a forced march on Mayenne, where he was resolved to execute the law according to his own good pleasure, and fill the half-empty companies of his own brigade with his Breton conscripts. The word "conscript" which later became so celebrated, had just now for the first time taken the place in the government decrees of the word requisitionnaire hitherto applied to ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... her care—the ex-convict obeying her lightest sign and giving little trouble, suffering himself to be led to some nook or other at the foot of the high cliffs, where he would sit down, watched by his attendant—the Breton woman—while Brettison busied ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... declining regional dialects and languages (Provencal, Breton, Alsatian, Corsican, Catalan, ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... he said in Breton, and I could not make out whether he meant that he had been in jail for the sake of a woman or of a "little red doe." The Breton language bristles with double meanings, symbols, and allegories. The word for doe in Breton is karvez; or for ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... the feather'd hats of the sweet pair, In blinding masses shower'd the golden hair— Then Iseult call'd them to her, and the three 35 Cluster'd under the holly-screen, and she Told them an old-world Breton history. ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... between the two great races of France. The world is not cognisant of this; but I have watched it with foreboding." "Define me the two types." "They shade into each other; but I will take, as perhaps extremes, the Gascon, and the Breton." "He proceeded," says the correspondent, "to sketch the characteristics of the people of Provence, Languedoc, and Gascony, and to contrast them with those of Brittany, middle, and north France, their idiosyncrasies of race, feeling, ...
— A Glossary of Provincial Words & Phrases in use in Somersetshire • Wadham Pigott Williams
... the north of Newfoundland, De Roberval was leaving the mouth of the Hochelaga; and, sailing westward past the island of Cape Breton, kept on his steady ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... statesman, diplomatist, soldier, and traveler in the Old World and the New, was one of the two or three human beings who, at the commencement of the nineteenth century, disputed with the emperor Napoleon the attention of Europe. Sprung from an old family of the Breton nobility—a race preserving longer perhaps than any other in France the traditions of the monarchy—he reluctantly gave in his adhesion to the de facto government of Napoleon; but the execution of the duc d'Enghien ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... Flambeau, called Flambart— "The glowing coal"—ex-sergeant grenadier. Mamma from Picardy; Papa a Breton. Joined at fourteen, two Germinal, year Three. Baptised, Marengo; got my corporal's stripes The fifteenth Fructidor, year Twelve. Silk hose And sergeant's cane, steeped in my tears of joy. July fourteenth, year Eighteen hundred and nine, At Schoenbrunn, for the Guards were here to serve The sacred ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... But it isn't the smackmen. Lobsters ought not to be kept in a well longer than a few days. A friend of mine started out from Halifax with ten thousand pounds of Cape Breton lobsters. He got caught in a gale of wind and lost forty-seven hundred pounds before he landed in Boston. Some years ago a Maine dealer put one hundred and five thousand lobsters in a pound during May and June; he ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... a time when they separated jerkily and became the hazy but definable figures of men in rough seaman's clothes. Johnny had never heard Breton French before; in his dazed condition the apparently insane gabble might well have been the tongue of another world and gave him little assurance. He hurt so badly and so generally that he could not have determined that ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... is presumed; indeed, there are references in early "lais" to a "Lai d'Orphey," indicating the existence of a poem which was probably the original of our King Orfeo. This original is presumed to have been a Breton lay, one of the many that were popular in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the English version may have been taken from the supposed source ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... in all probability Job had from Noah himself. Again, Rowland Jones tried to prove that Celtic was the primitive tongue, and that it passed through Babel unharmed. Still another effect was made by a Breton to prove that all languages took their rise in the language of Brittany. All was chaos. There was much wrangling, but little earnest controversy. Here and there theologians were calling out frantically, beseeching the Church to save the old doctrine as "essential to the truth ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the greatest of these, of Lancelot himself, is less distinct. Since the audacious imaginativeness of the late M. de la Villemarque, which once, I am told, brought upon him the epithet "Faussaire!" uttered in full conclave of Breton antiquaries, has ceased to be taken seriously by Arthurian students, the old fancies about some Breton "Ancel" or "Ancelot" have been quietly dropped. But the Celticisers still cling fondly to the supposed possibility of derivation from ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... its impressions. Climates that breathe amorous secrets and futile regrets may agree with an old and disillusioned man like myself; but they must always prove fatal to a temperament which is still unformed. Believe me," he went on with emphasis, "the waters of that bay—more Breton than Norman—may exert a sedative influence, though even that is of questionable value, upon a heart which, like mine, is no longer unbroken, a heart for whose wounds there is no longer anything to compensate. But at your age, my boy, those waters are contra-indicated.... Good night to you, neighbours," ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... named it New France, in honor of the French King. On April 20, 1534, Cartier, with two small vessels of about sixty tons each, set sail from the Britanny port of St. Malo for Newfoundland, on the banks of which Cartier's Breton and Norman countrymen had long been accustomed to fish. The incidents of this and the subsequent voyages of the St. Malo mariner, with an account of the expedition under the Viceroy of Canada, the Sieur de Roberval, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... satisfaction of the disputants, who wax hot over the claims of a point near Cape Chidley on the coast of Labrador, of Bonavista, on the east shore of Newfoundland, of Cape North, or some other point, on the island of Cape Breton. Another expedition left Bristol in 1498, but while it is now generally believed that Cabot coasted the shores of North America from Labrador or Cape Breton as far as Cape Hatteras, we have no details of this ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... was the Jongleuse of William Longsword, son of Henry II. and Fair Rosamond, and he certainly deserves the gratitude of the literary world for discovering and fostering her wonderful talent. Born probably in Brittany, her life and works identified her with the English. She was familiar with the Breton tongue, and also with Latin. Her first production was a set of lays in French verse, that met with instant popularity throughout England. The courts of the nobles reechoed with her praises, and ladies as well as knights ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... then, unless one has the figure——" she glanced at Fouchette doubtfully. "I'm getting too stout for anything but Roman mothers, Breton peasants, etc. You're too thin even for an ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... la vie et les Le Breton Paris, 1810 ouvrages de Haydn" in the Moniteur. This was reprinted in the "Bibliographie Musicale," Paris, 1822. It was also translated into Portuguese, with additions ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... therefore tolerably certain that where, according to phrenologists, the organ of Hope is situated, there the Breton ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... 1140, 'De miraculis Beatae Virginis rupis Amatoris,' wherein he speaks of her as the 'Star of the Sea,' and the hymn 'Ave maris stella' is one of those most frequently sung in these days by the pilgrims at Roc-Amadour. A statement, written and signed by a Breton pilgrim in 1534, shows how widely this particular devotion had then spread among those who trusted their lives ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... course the men coming there are all pretty good to begin with, leaving out the fellows who are born and brought up around Gloucester and who have it in their blood. A man doesn't leave Newfoundland or Cape Breton or even Nova Scotia or Maine and the islands along the coast, or give up any safe, steady work he may have, to come to Gloucester to fish unless he feels that he can come pretty near to holding his ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly
... in some of the nooks and corners of the provinces. Paris is, like other capitals, an epitome of the world; but Languedoc, the wild country of Auvergne, the Vosges mountains, the hidden and quiet vales of Normandy, and even the melancholy sands of the Breton, have airs of singular and characteristic sweetness. Gretry and Rousseau were but their copyists. Sorrow, solitude, and love, are every where, and their inspiration is worth all the orchestras ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... declared an extra dividend that had enabled them that day to deposit to her credit in the bank the sum of four thousand two hundred and eighty-one dollars and seventy-three cents, in a little hut on the black Breton ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... flung his cloak over a chair. "Get up, you rascal!" he cried impatiently. "You pig, you dog!" he continued, with increasing anger. "Sleeping there as though your master were not ruined by that scoundrel of a Breton! Bah!" he added, gazing bitterly at his follower, "you are of the canaille, and have neither honour to lose ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... give his authorities for his statements, and has all the shyness of an antiquarian toward facts for which he has not full proof. Through Breton tales, for example, he heard of the fairy fountain of Barenton in the forest of Broceliande, where fays and many another marvel were to be seen, and he determined to visit it in order to find out how true these ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... of Saint Anne. This temple arose not far from a chapel begun two years before, under the care of the Abbe de Queylus. The origin of this place of devotion, it appears, was a great peril to which certain Breton sailors were exposed: assailed by a tempest in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, about the beginning of the seventeenth century, they made a vow to erect, if they escaped death, a chapel to good Saint ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... baronial honors. Sir William, indeed; had helped, more than any other man, to bring the people who despoiled him to a national consciousness. If he did not imagine, he mainly managed the plucky New England expedition against Louisbourg at Cape Breton a half century before the War of Independence; and his splendid success in rending that stronghold from the French taught the colonists that they were Americans, and need be Englishmen no longer than they liked. His ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... assumed the chair of the Moralist, with its right to lecture, and went over to the enemy; his talk savoured of a German. Our holding of the balance, taking two sides, is incomprehensible to a people quivering with the double wound to body and soul. She was of Breton blood. Cymric enough was in Nesta to catch any thrill from her and join to her mood, if it hung out a colour sad or gay, and was noble, as any mood of this dear ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... set sail from Boston for Cape Breton, to take part in the siege of that place, and our company, under Rogers, started on the march for Fort Edward. The snow was deep, and we travelled on snowshoes. Rogers made us march in single file, with a man some distance ahead, and another behind. On either ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan
... of a God" (Vol. 1, p. 117) was related to me by my old Indian nurse. I heard a rather different version of it from a venerable clergyman of the name of Thaxter. He had it from a Captain Richardson, who was killed at Cape Breton in the "Old French War." It is a very common tradition, though it has not, as far as I know, been before in print. This tradition also refers to the first meeting of the natives ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... Indies. There can be no doubt upon this point, for in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris is preserved an unique copy of the map engraved in 1544, that is to say, in the lifetime of Sebastian Cabot, which mentions this voyage, and the precise and exact date of the discovery of Cape Breton. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... Millet, far from typical; a capital Schreyer, two portraits by the German Von Lenbach, a small but interesting sample of Alma Tadema's finished style, and the sensational "Consolatrix Afflictorum" by Dagnan-Bouveret. Better still, in Jules Breton's "The Vintage" and Troyon's "Landscape and Cattle" it has two of the noblest paintings to be seen in the entire Palace,— pictures that show these great ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... Breton, in his "Fantasticks," 1626, observes: "Milk, Butter and Cheese are the labourers dyet; and a pot of good Beer quickens ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... set up by the jovial assembly rang in Valentin's ears, but he could not grasp the sense of a single word. Vague thoughts crossed him of the Breton peasant's life of mechanical labor, without a wish of any kind; he pictured him burdened with a family, tilling the soil, living on buckwheat meal, drinking cider out of a pitcher, believing in the Virgin and the King, taking the sacrament at Easter, dancing ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... of Brittany, perhaps resident in that Breton colony in London called Little Britain. Bret The Old French nominative ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... big and too long. Their sleeves hung down over their hands, and they found their enormous red breeches, which compelled them to waddle, very much in the way. Under their stiff, high helmets their faces had little character—two poor, sallow Breton faces, simple with an almost animal simplicity, and with gentle and ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... unusual thing to see birds in the Breton churches; many live there and fasten their nests to the stones of the nave; they are never disturbed. When it rains, they all gather in the church, but as soon as the sun pierces the clouds and the rain-spouts dry up, they repair to the trees again. So that during the storm ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... the English writers, consisted of six thousand provincials, and eight hundred seamen, and a combined naval force of near seven hundred guns. The troops landed, and laid siege to the town. The garrison of the fortifications of Louisburg consisted of six hundred regulars and one thousand Breton militia, or, according to some writers, of only twelve hundred men in all. The armament of these works was one hundred and one cannon, seventy-six swivels, and six mortars. Auxiliary to the main works were an island-battery of thirty ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... He secured from Elizabeth (1578) a liberal patent, and sailed, with a considerable body of adventurers, for the new world. But he took a too northerly direction, and his largest vessel was shipwrecked on the coast of Cape Breton. The enterprise from various causes, completely failed, and the intrepid ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... nights be the palace of fatigue and dulness. To these, that black swarm, slow and serried—coming, going, winding, turning, returning, mounting, descending, comparable only to ants on a pile of wood—is no more intelligible than the Bourse to a Breton peasant who has never heard ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... has been found possible to confine and cultivate coast sand-hills, even without preliminary forestal plantation. Thus, in the vicinity of Cap Breton in France, a peculiar process is successfully employed, both for preventing the drifting of dunes, and for rendering the sands themselves immediately productive; but this method is applicable only in exceptional cases of favorable climate and exposure. It consists ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... "They are Breton soldiers," the officer explains, "and the men of my burying company are Bretons too. They have just discovered that these dead men we have gathered from the fields were soldiers from a regiment recruited in their own district. And seven of them have recognised among these twenty-two ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... mine," said the deep voice of the younger rider, in the Romance or Norman tongue, "I have heard that the small people of whom my neighbours, the Breton tell us much, abound greatly in this fair land of yours; and if I were not by the side of one whom no creature unassoilzed and unbaptised dare approach, by sweet St. Valery I should say—yonder stands one of those same ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of Highlanders in British America was at Pictou, Nova Scotia. The stream of Scottish emigration which flowed in after years, not only over the county of Pictou, but also over the greater portion of eastern Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island, and even the upper provinces of Canada, was largely due to this settlement; for these emigrants, in after years, communicated with their friends and induced them to take up their abode in the new country. The stream ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... to-day speaks a Romance dialect, he is mainly of Celto-Iberian blood; and though most Mexicans and Peruvians speak Spanish, yet the great majority of them trace their descent back to the subjects of Montezuma and the Incas. Moreover, exactly as in Europe little ethnic islands of Breton and Basque stock have remained unaffected by the Romance flood, so in America there are large communities where the inhabitants keep unchanged the speech and the customs of ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the publication of Chambers's Cyclopaedia, an Englishman (Mills) and a German (Sellius) went to Le Breton with a project for its translation into French. The bookseller obtained the requisite privilege from the government, but he obtained it for himself, and not for the projectors. This trick led to a quarrel, and before it was settled the German died and the Englishman returned to his own country. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... tended to support it longer on the column of air; it was darted at 100 paces, and remained in a horizontal position for three-fourths of the distance. The children were early trained to the exercise: Lieutenant Breton saw a child, five years old, throw a stick through the ring affixed to the wall of the gaol, ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... Manet, seem, by a sort of instinctive preference, to seek out the ugly, rather than to give us an exact reproduction of contemporaneous Nature. Some of our genre painters—Millet, for example, and Jules Breton—have, it is true, studied the actual and the modern, but their types are all taken from the rustic class, and it is safe to say that outside of portraiture neither the men nor the women of the world will leave a trace upon the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... peoples live pretty much the same kind of lives on either side of the Channel. And when the onion-sellers come from France they are greeted with enthusiasm by the Cornish people, and although they speak their own tongue, they are perfectly understood. See! there is one of the Breton onion-sellers lounging among a knot of fishermen near the door of yonder picturesque old Cornish cottage, whilst the wife stands in the open doorway, arms a-kimbo, listening as the foreigner tells of the things that he has seen across the Channel since last he visited this coast. And up the ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... dine frequently in a restaurant in the Rue de Clichy, Paris. Here were, among others, two waitresses that attracted my attention. One was a beautiful, pale young girl, to whom I never spoke, for she was employed far away from the table which I affected. The other, a stout, middle-aged managing Breton woman, had sole command over my table and me, and gradually she began to assume such a maternal tone towards me that I saw I should be compelled to leave that restaurant. If I was absent for a couple of nights running ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... hung at Tyburn, attended by their ordinary, Mr. Machenly (a grotesque name for the ranting fellow who was wont to be known as Orator Henley); Father Poignardini, an Italian Jesuit, made Privy-Seal; four Heretics burnt in Smithfield; the French Ambassador made a Duke, with precedence; Cape Breton given back to the French, with Gibraltar and Port Mahon to the Spaniards; the Pope's nuncio entering London, and the Lord Mayor and Aldermen kissing his feet; an office opened in Drury Lane for the sale of papistical Pardons and Indulgences; with the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... the Atlantic period of history, the western front of Europe superseded the Mediterranean side in the historical leadership of the continent. The Breton coast of France waked up, the southern seaboard dozed. The old centers in the Aegean and Adriatic became drowsy corners. The busy traffic of the Mediterranean was transferred to the open ocean, where, from ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... embraces of the spiritual ladies of the woodlands are fatal to men. The legend has been told to me in the Highlands, and to Mr. Stevenson in Samoa, while my cousin, Mr. J. J. Atkinson, actually knew a Kaneka who died in three days after an amour like that of Anchises. The Breton ballad, Le Sieur Nan, turns on the same opinion. The amour of Thomas the Rhymer is a mediaeval ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... first time when eighteen, the second time at sixty-nine. By his first wife he had a rather ugly daughter who married, at sixteen, a landlord of Provins, Rogron by name. Auffray had another daughter, by his second marriage, a charming girl, this time, who married a Breton captain in the Imperial Guard. Pierrette Lorrain was the daughter of this officer. The old grocer Auffray died at the time of the Empire without having had time enough to make his will. The inheritance was so skillfully manipulated by Rogron, the first son-in-law ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... French folk, whereso'er ye be, Who love your country, soil and sand. From Paris to the Breton sea, And back again to Norman strand, Forsooth ye seem a silly band, Sheep without shepherd, left to chance— Far otherwise our Fatherland If Villon were the King ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... under certain conditions, the Gaul was indistinguishable from the German. The assertion that the Anglo-Saxon character is midway between the pure French or Irish and the Teutonic, he met with the previous question, Who is the pure Frenchman? Picard, Provencal, or Breton? or the pure Irish? Milesian, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... necessary. Hence, in the celebrated Treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, it was provided that all Nova Scotia or Acadia should be yielded and made over to the Queen of Great Britain and to her crown forever, together with Newfoundland, France retaining possession of Cape Breton. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... Breton who, on the Battle field of the Marne, was shot in the chest. The death agony at once set in, and in his agony he asked for a crucifix. No priest happened to be on the spot, there was only a Jewish rabbi. The rabbi ran to get the crucifix, ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... stale, despite the years and the wrinkles, were not the ideal form of happiness for a being condemned to this earth. This poetical monomaniac lived with his dreams realized, finding, in an asylum of Vaugirard, all the fascinations and chimeras of the Breton land of golden blossoms and pink heather, all the intoxicating, languorous charm of ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... and Welsh languages, but all of the young people in the British Isles learn English, and they are generally content to talk only one language. The other Celtic languages which have existed within the last one hundred years are the Gaelic of the north of Scotland, the Breton of western France, and the Cornish of the southwestern corner ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet
... squalid, horrible little inn. Guttural German notes mixed whimsically with sibilant Spanish and flowing Portuguese. Cracked Biscayan—which no Spaniard will allow to be Spanish—jarred upon the suavity of Italian accents, and through the din the heavy steadiness of a Breton voice could be heard asserting itself. Though every man spoke in French, for the purposes of the common parliament, each man swore in his own tongue; and they all swore briskly and crisply, with a seemingly inexhaustible vocabulary of blasphemy and obscenity, so that the foul air of that ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... introduction of Carib words and forms, so that in 1674 the missionary De la Borde wrote, that "although there is some difference between the dialects of the men and women, they readily understand each other;"[11] and Father Breton in his Carib Grammar (1665) gives the same forms for the declensions ...
— The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations • Daniel G. Brinton
... July, the Cyrus being seen in the offing, I ordered her by telegraph to take a position close in with the Baleine light-house, and to examine strictly every vessel that might attempt to put to sea from the Pertuis de Breton, as Buonaparte was on the spot, ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland
... old merchant and thrust him through with his lance. He half rose, groaned and fell back, dead. Others, dismounting, seized upon the astonished and indignant castaways, and took from them with the deftness of practiced hands whatever they had of value. This was too much for the Breton and English sailors. They would have fought it out then and there. But Nicholas spoke quickly so that ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... too have seen the castled West, Her Cornish creeks, her Breton ports, Her caves by knees of hermits pressed, Her fairy islets bright with quartz: And dearer now each well-known scene, For what shall ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... the account given by M. Luzel of the Veillees in which he has often taken part in Brittany. In the lonely farmhouse after the evening meal prayers are said, and the life in Breton of the saint of the day read, all the family assemble with the servants and labourers around the old-fashioned hearth, where the fire of oaken logs spirts and blazes, defying the wind and the rain or snow without. The talk is of ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... of the Tristan myth is lost in antiquity. The Welsh Triads, of unknown date, but very ancient, know of one Drystan ab Tallwch, the lover of Essylt the wife of March, as a steadfast lover and a mighty swineherd. It is indubitably Celtic-Breton, Irish, or Welsh. There were different versions of the story, into the shadowy history of which we need not enter; the only one which concerns us is that of a certain "Thomas." Of his French poem fragments alone have come down to us, but ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... know a crab from a cauliflower; and then they are such dunces, that there's no making them comprehend the plainest proposition — In the beginning of the war, this poor half-witted creature told me, in a great fright, that thirty thousand French had marched from Acadie to Cape Breton — "Where did they find transports? (said I)" "Transports (cried he) I tell you they marched by land" — "By land to the island of Cape Breton?" "What! is Cape Breton an island?" "Certainly." "Ha! are you sure of that?" When I pointed it out in the map, he examined it earnestly with ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... by a Breton gentleman, with whom Mimi was soon rapidly smitten, and she had no need to pray long before ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... Renaissance canopy of white marble, elaborately worked with arabesques and che- rubs, in a relief so low that it gives the work a cer- tain look of being softened and worn by time, lies the body of the Breton soldier, with, a crucifix clasped to his breast and a shroud thrown over his body. At each of the angles sits a figure in bronze, the two best of which, representing Charity and Military Courage, had given me extraordinary pleasure ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... to the subterranean passage, and reappeared a couple of minutes later leading a man easily recognized by his costume as a peasant, and by his square head with its shock of red hair for a Breton. He advanced in the centre of the circle without appearing in the least intimidated, fixing his eyes on each of the monks in turn, and waiting until one of these twelve granite statues should break silence. The president was the ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... struggled into existence, the soul of woman was already glowing with the emotion which we, to-day, realise as love. I have three witnesses to prove this statement. The Lais of the French poetess Marie de France, based on Breton and Celtic motifs, are permeated by a sweet sentimentality, very nearly related to the sentiment of our popular ballads. They tell of simple feelings, of love and longing and the grief of love. One of her lais treats the touching ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... inquire whether any French squadron had passed through the straits; and that, being certified in the affirmative, as it was probably designed for North America, he should immediately detach rear-admiral West to Louisbourg, on the island of cape Breton, with such a number of ships, as, when joined with those at Halifax, would constitute a force superior to the armament of the enemy. On the second day of May, admiral Byng arrived at Gibraltar, where he found captain Edgecumbe, with the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... save a folding looking-glass which I bought at Cape Breton Island, and a figured handkerchief from the Jamaica exhibition, I went ashore one evening at Portsmouth and bought a few little presents to carry home to my relatives in order that they should possess something to regard as a token of ...
— From Lower Deck to Pulpit • Henry Cowling
... adjoining countries were called by the French Acadie. Pepys is not the only official personage whose ignorance of Nova Scotia is on record. A story is current of a prime minister (Duke of Newcastle) who was surprised at hearing Cape Breton was an island. "Egad, I'll go tell the King Cape Breton is an island!" Of the same it is said, that when told Annapolis was in danger, and ought to be defended: "Oh! certainly Annapolis must be defended,— ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... fresh provisions. We were here joined by different men of war and transport ships with soldiers; after which, our fleet being increased to a prodigious number of ships of all kinds, we sailed for Cape Breton in Nova Scotia. We had the good and gallant General Wolfe on board our ship, whose affability made him highly esteemed and beloved by all the men. He often honoured me, as well as other boys, with marks ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... in her deck-chair. "That's bad," she answered; "for the first officer is taking no more heed of Ushant than of his latter end. He has forgotten the existence of the Breton coast. His head is just stuffed with Mrs. Ogilvy's eyelashes. Very pretty, long eyelashes, too; I don't deny it; but they won't help him to get through the narrow channel. ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... a Kermadio, and so, as this name implies to a French ear, a Breton noble, and therefore almost certainly an extreme royalist, and so least likely to be suspected ...
— Bataille De Dames • Eugene Scribe and Ernest Legouve
... a stepping-stone between the Old World and the New. At its south-western extremity it approaches within 50 miles of the island of Cape Breton, while its most eastern projection is but 1640 miles distant from Ireland. Its population in 1881 was 161,384, and its area was estimated at 42,006 square miles; but, strange as it seems, up to the present time the interior is almost unknown, while the mere existence of certain ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... superiority of taste and intelligence which it was the fashion to ascribe to the inhabitants of that city were wholly imaginary; and that the nation would never enjoy a really good government till the Alsatian people, the Breton people, the people of Bearn, the people of Provence, should have each an independent existence, and laws suited to its own tastes and habits. These communities he proposed to unite by a tie similar to that which binds ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... far north as the southern line of Kansas. Jacques Cartier, following another will-o'-the-wisp to the north, and searching for the storied city of Norembega, supposed to exist somewhere in the wilderness south of Cape Breton, found it not, indeed, but laid the foundations for the great empire which France was to establish ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... another's ears, imparting excessively mysterious information of the utmost importance, putting a finger to their lips, screwing up their eyes to enjoin secrecy. A provincial flavor distinguished them all, with differences of inflection, Southern excitability, the drawling accent of the Centre, Breton sing-song, all blended in the same idiotic, strutting self-sufficiency; frock-coats after the style of Landerneau, mountain shoes, and home-spun linen; the monumental assurance of village clubs, local expressions, provincialisms abruptly imported into political ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... fogs are dried, the frigate's side is bright with melting tar, The lad up in the foretop sees square white sails afar; The east wind drives three square-sailed masts from out the Breton bay, And "Clear for action!" Farmer shouts, and ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... passed quietly, and that night we were relieved by the 25th Canadians and marched to Aix Noulette, where we embussed and went to Monchy Breton for a rest. ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... regardless of her exiled children. She treated the Loyalists with a liberality far exceeding that of the United States to the war-worn soldiers of Washington. John Howe was rewarded with the offices of King's Printer, and {18} Postmaster-General of Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and the Bermudas. But in spite of these high-sounding titles, the family income was small, and all the economies of Joe's mother—his father's second wife, a shrewd ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... operate. The well-known marine writer, Mahan, emphasizes the fact that a landing operation must be offensive to succeed. Military history shows that after boldly carried out landings at Abukir and Cape Breton, for example, the success of the extensive operations was impaired, almost lost, because of lack of energy and rapidity of execution of offensive movements. The assembled strength must be thrown forward on ...
— Operations Upon the Sea - A Study • Franz Edelsheim
... two ancient pieces of cannon taken from the English, who unsuccessfully laid siege to the place in 1422. Close to the gate are the two rival inns, which are very primitive in their arrangement, the entrance hall forming the kitchen, as in many old Breton houses. A second frowning old gateway leads to the single street, which, passing between two rows of antique gabled houses, and under the chancel of the little parish church, conducts one to the almost interminable flight of stone ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... the Island of Cape Breton, the North American Squadron in 1746 lost so many men through the seductions practised by New England skippers frequenting that port, that Townsend, the admiral in command, indited a strongly worded protest to Shirley, then Governor of Massachusetts; but the latter, though deploring ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... his great discovery in the Arctic Sea he reached Winter Harbor, on the coast of Labrador, and from there sent me a wireless message that he had nailed the Stars and Stripes to the North Pole. This went to Sydney, on Cape Breton Island, and was forwarded thence by cable and telegraph ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... Cezanne. A very real affinity exists, too, between Paul Gauguin, who was a friend and to a certain extent the master of Van Gogh, and Cezanne and Renoir. Paul Gauguin's robust talent found its first motives in Breton landscapes, in which the method of colour-spots can be found employed with delicacy and placed at the service of a rather heavy, but very interesting harmony. Then the artist spent a long time in Tahiti, whence he returned with a completely transformed manner. He has brought back from these regions ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... her a Day or Two before she was taken: One of which is the Prize carried into Bristol as beforementioned; and another of them is said to be the trading Sloop that was seized at Rhode-Island last Week. Two other Vessels, they say, sail'd the Day before them for Cape-Breton. ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... guarded by a chain of forts extending all along the Atlantic coast, from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. That on Cape Breton Island, which protected the approach to the St. Lawrence, was considered invincible, its walls being thirty feet high, forty feet thick, and surrounded by a moat ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... "Characters upon Essays, Moral and Divine" and in 1616 a set of Characters called "The Good and the Bad." He was of a good Essex family, second son of William Breton of Redcross Street, in the parish of St. Giles without Cripplegate. His father was well-to-do, and died in January 1559 (new style) when Nicholas was a boy. His mother took for second husband George Gascoigne the poet. Only a chance note in a diary informs us that Nicholas ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... fatigues of the climb, "the gallant girl" reached the summit and heard her stepfather declaim two stanzas of poetry in Welsh, to the grinning astonishment of a small group of English tourists and the great interest of a Welshman, who asked Borrow if he were a Breton. ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... Nicholas Breton's Fantasticks, 1626.—MR. HEBER says, "Who has seen another copy?" In Tanner's Collection in the Bodleian Library is one copy, and in the British Museum is another, the latter ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 59, December 14, 1850 • Various
... describing a Breton bed, and the white cap was the coiffe that my mother wore. And if she lay there in her black dress, with a band about her chin, I knew that it could ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... cannot understand it," replied the Breton. "It is not at such a moment that the Seigneur de Locmaria would hunt. No, ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... his own mind a whole world, and he peopled it. He wandered in the shade of those Norman groves; he saw the Breton hero and Madame Bryond among the gorse and shrubbery; he inhabited the old chateau of Saint-Savin; he shared in the diverse acts of all those many personages, picturing to himself the notary, the merchant, ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... become British subjects in name, but all the secret efforts of France were devoted to preventing them from becoming so in sentiment. What is now New Brunswick was still French territory, as were also Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton. It was the hope of the French king, Louis XV, that if the Acadians could be kept thoroughly French at heart Acadie might yet be won back to shine on the front ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts
... other country of Europe some national means of recording them would have long ago been adopted. M. Luzel, e.g., was commissioned by the French Minister of Public Instruction to collect and report on the Breton folk-tales. England, here as elsewhere without any organised means of scientific research in the historical and philological sciences, has to depend on the enthusiasm of a few private individuals for work of national importance. ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... been to lower the case coiled up their rope and started off on foot inland, after telling the sentinel stationed at the head of the little path to rejoin his boat. This the man was only too willing to do at once. He was a semi-superstitious Breton of no great intelligence, who vastly preferred being afloat in his unsavoury yawl to climbing about unknown rocks in the dark. On the beach, he found his two comrades, to whom he gruffly imparted the information that they were ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... to the walls of Saragossa—an expedition immortalised in the Chanson de Roland, the earliest and most famous epic of the Charlemagne cycle, but fabulous from first to last, except in recording the fact that there was a certain Roland (warden of the Breton Mark) who fell in the course of the Frankish retreat. More substantial work was done in Spain during the last years of the reign. Navarre declared for the Franks and Christianity; the eldest son of Charles captured Tortosa at the mouth of the Ebro (811), ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... another said, "you were delicious in Francois le Champi, but there is not a single Breton woman in the whole of Brittany ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... the Vikings to harry other lands in like manner drove the Normans to piratical plundering up and down the English Channel, and, when they had settled in England, led to continual sea-fights in the Channel between English and French, hardy Kentish and Norman, or Cornish and Breton, sailors, with a common strain of fighting blood, and a common love of ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... century, a period when London was "clean." This is a poetic license; many a plague found mediaeval London abominably dirty! A Celt himself, no doubt, with the Celt's proverbial way of being impossibilium cupitor, Mr. Morris was in full sympathy with his Breton Squire, who, in the reign of Edward III., sets forth to seek the Earthly Paradise, and the land where Death never comes. Much more dramatic, I venture to think, than any passage of "Jason," is that where the dreamy seekers of dreamland, ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... that Nonconformity which has come to be the faith in which a large number of people are trained is a totally different business, and affects a very different kind of sentiments. Personal and independent conviction has no more to do with it than it has to do with the ardour of a Breton peasant trained in deepest zeal of Romanism, or the unbounded certainty of any other traditionary believer. For this reason we may be allowed to discuss the changes of feeling which manifested themselves in Mr. and Mrs. Beecham ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... of the island with Arctic ice. Having named the point at which he first touched land Cape Bona Vista, he cruised about till, the ice having melted, he could sail down the straits of Belle Isle between the mainland of Labrador and Newfoundland, already discovered by Breton fishermen. Then he explored the now familiar Gulf of St. Lawrence—the first European to report on it. All through June the little French ships sailed about the Gulf, darting across from island to island and cape to cape. Prince Edward Island appealed ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... Plymouth division of the marines, and had served under Admiral Keppel. He left New South Wales after a couple of years' service, and joined the 91st, and was rapidly promoted, until in 1807 he was made brigadier-general and given a command at Cape Breton. He was a brother of Evan Nepean, Under-Secretary at the Home Office at the time of the foundation of the colony; and the Nepean river, the source of Sydney's water supply, to this day reminds Australians of ...
— The Naval Pioneers of Australia • Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery
... Queen the education of his daughter Anne, who at this school of the Court of Ladies became one of the most distinguished women of her day. The same Queen, as Duchess of Brittany, created a company of one hundred Breton gentlemen, who accompanied her everywhere. "They never failed," says the author of "Illustrious Women," "when she went to mass or took a walk, to await her return on the little terrace of Blois, which is still called the Perche aux Bretons. She gave it this ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... brought together, bound and helpless, under the eye of the inexorable Adelantado. But now Mendoza interposed. "I was a priest," he says, "and had the bowels of a man." He asked, that, if there were Christians, that is to say Catholics, among the prisoners, they should be set apart. Twelve Breton sailors professed themselves to be such; and these, together with four carpenters and calkers, "of whom," writes Menendez, "I was in great need," were put on board the boat and sent to St. Augustine. The rest were ordered to march ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various |
