"Flamboyant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... language, strong, picturesque, and highly profane language, suitable for expressing violent emotion over a telephone wire. It was once rebuked by a very gentle captain with a remark that was widely quoted afterwards. The language had been unusually flamboyant and was becoming worse. "Hold on a minute," said the listener, "and let the line cool. It's nearly red ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... old brick structure, and it stood among the gayest, the most flamboyant dwellings of all Corliss Street like a bewildered tramp surrounded by carnival maskers. It held place full in the course of the fury for demolition and rebuilding, but remained unaltered—even unrepaired, one might have thought—since the early seventies, when it was built. There ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... you could go out without your 'art in your mouth an account of them 'orful shellses, a fair female form in a large and flamboyant hat, whose imitation ostridge tips were now mere bundles of quill shavings, and whose flowers were as wilted as the other blossoms of her heart, wandered disconsolately round her Walt's place of bondage, waving a lily hand on the chance of being seen and recognised. Tactics productive ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... The d'Harcourt at midnight is ablaze with light, but the crowd is common and you move on up the boulevard under the trees, past the shops full of Quartier fashions—velvet coats, with standing collars buttoning close under the chin; flamboyant black silk scarfs tied in a huge bow; queer broad-brimmed, black hats without which no ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... a lovely shore under the cathedral-crowned hill, where the velvety turf slopes down to the sea under palms and trees whose trunks are one mass of ferns, brightened by that wonderful flowering tree variously known as the "flamboyant" and the "flame of the forest" (Poinciana regia). Very still, hot, tropical, sleepy, and dreamy, Malacca looks, a town "out of the running," utterly antiquated, mainly un-English, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... it was thirteen years since he had been in England. He listened to the fragmentary English sentences he heard, finding pleasure in the sound. He marvelled idly at the lack of colour in the scene before him. The posters on the walls alone struck a flamboyant note. Yet there was something restful in the monochrome of the dresses, the dull smoke-griminess of the station. At all events it was a contrast to the vivid colouring of the ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... made an enormous success in "The Return of Peter Grimm"—had he but possessed an aptitude for histrionic achievement. He might have sung at the Metropolitan year after year without ceasing if Miss Geraldine Farrar had not taken an instantaneous dislike to him at sight—and had he but possessed a flamboyant temperament and an elementary knowledge of Puccini. In fact there is almost nothing he couldn't have been if only Fate had but weaned him at the breast of opportunity instead of ordaining his life drama to be played out in lonely dignity in the drab but intensely political ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... poems, astonishment at his versatility is the first emotion produced. It is hard to believe that the 'Biglow Papers' slid from under the hand that wrote the 'Prometheus' and the 'Legend of Brittany.' His genius flashes upon us like a certain flamboyant style of poetic architecture—the flowing, flame-like curves of his humor blending happily with the Gothic cusps of veneration for the old, with quaint ivy-leaves, green and still rustling under the wind and rain, springing ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... came to see Neal. His talk was very different from the flamboyant exultation of Felix Matier; very different also from Donald Ward's cool delight in the prospect of battle. James Hope seemed to realise the awful gravity of taking up arms against established government. He alone ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... instinct forces man to journey on, Urged by a longing blind but dominant! Nothing he sees can hold him, nothing daunt His never failing eagerness. The sun Setting in splendour every night has won His vassalage; those towers flamboyant Of airy cloudland palaces now haunt His daylight wanderings. Forever done With simple joys and quiet happiness He guards the vision of the sunset sky; Though faint with weariness he must possess Some fragment of the sunset's majesty; He spurns life's human ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... called it in 1495, we can trace every aspect of Canale's time, when the city had as yet lost nothing of its splendour or its animation. At the entrance stands S. Maria della Salute, that sanctuary dear to Venetian hearts, built as a votive offering after the visitation of the plague in 1631. Its flamboyant dome, with its volutes, its population of stone saints, its green bronze door catching the light, pleased Canale, as it pleased Sargent in our own day, and he painted it over and over again. The annual fete of the Confraternity of the ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... farther in weak tongue-like sections, as described in the "Seven Lamps." I have only here given one example of this family, an unimportant but sufficiently characteristic one (16) from St. Gervais of Falaise. One side of the nave of that church is Norman, the other Flamboyant, and the two piers 14 and 16 stand opposite each other. It would be useless to endeavor to trace farther the fantasticism of the later Gothic shafts; they become mere aggregations of mouldings very sharply and finely cut, their bases at the same time running together in ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... of us to an inn on the West Coast, and all its windows opened on a wide harbour, hill-enclosed. Only small coasting craft were there, mostly ketches; but we had topsail schooners also and barquantines, those ascending and aerial rigs that would be flamboyant but for the transverse spars of the foremast, giving one who scans them the proper apprehension of ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... village-like farms have caught the warmth. The cathedral, visible far and wide over the fields seemingly of loose wild-flowers, itself a rich mixture of all the varieties of the Pointed style down to the latest Flamboyant, may be noticed among the greater French churches for breadth of proportions internally, and is famous for its almost unrivalled treasure of stained glass, chiefly of a florid, elaborate, later type, with much highly conscious artistic contrivance in ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... principles, neither on vertical nor on horizontal lines,—blended together, sometimes Grecian porticos on Elizabethan structures, spires resting not on towers but roofs, Byzantine domes on Grecian temples, Greek columns with Lombard arches, flamboyant panelling, pendant pillars from the roof, all styles mixed up together, Corinthian pilasters acting as Gothic buttresses, and pointed arches with Doric friezes,—a heap of diverse forms, alien alike from the principles ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... vast interior thronged with men and women in the usual dismal, black Flemish cloaks, kneeling in confession, or waiting patiently for their turn to confess, in preparation for the Easter Mass. Here the best feature, till lately, was the glorious Flamboyant rood-screen, recalling those at Albi and the church of Brou, in France; and remarkable in Belgium as one of the very few examples of its sort (there is, or was, another in St. Pierre, at Louvain) of so early a period, in a land where rood-screens, as a body, are ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... to lace, but which gains nothing by the comparison. The screen, together with the enclosure of the choir, with which it is connected, is quite bewildering by the multiplicity of arches, gables, tabernacles, pinnacles, statues, leaves, and flowers. The tracery is flamboyant, and the work dates from the beginning of the sixteenth century. The artificers are said to have been a company of wandering ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... absentmindedly interviewed his prospective vicar with his head bristling with quills like a porcupine. He is said to have insisted on his wife's using rouge though she had naturally a high colour, and to have gone fishing in a resplendent blue coat and silk stockings. Such was the flamboyant personality of the man whose first novel attracted the kindly attention of Scott. His oddities, which would have rejoiced the heart of Dickens, are not without significance in a study of his literary work, for his love of emphasis and ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... with its flamboyant entrance, round which the lights flared enticingly at night, had always seemed to Nance an earthly paradise into which the financially blessed alone were privileged to enter. At the "Star" there were acrobats and funny Jews ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... the fact as to whether it be the severe and unornamental varieties of the Low Countries or the exaggerations of the most ornately flamboyant style, appears not only to please the casual and average observer, but the thorough student of ecclesiastical architecture as well. It has come to be the accepted form throughout the world of what is best representative of the thought and purpose for which ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... see what machinery the Government has to protect you and prevent the letter-carrier from bringing daily to your door the flamboyant literature intended to lure your money from the bank. There are five hundred Post-Office inspectors employed in watching Uncle Sam's mail wherever it is carried, in keeping the vast and complicated machinery of the Post Office Department oiled and working ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... falconry, descriptions of big-game hunts etc... and finally seated at the table was the man himself. Forty to forty-five years of age, short, fat, stocky and ruddy, clad in shirt-sleeves and flannel trousers, with a close-clipped wiry beard and a flamboyant eye. In one hand he held a book and with the other he brandished an enormous pipe, its bowl covered by a metal cap; and as he read some stirring tale of the pursuit of hairy creatures, he made, pushing out his lower lip, a fierce grimace ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... well. My prestige was a bit too flamboyant, Cissie. All I had to do was to mention a plan. The Sons and Daughters didn't even discuss it. They put it right through. That wasn't healthy. Our whole system of society, all democracies are based ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... was young, fantastically young if you were to judge by his garb, a flamboyant expression of the romantic cowboy style which might have served as a sensational exhibit in a shop-window. In place of the conventional blue wool shirt was one of dark blue silk. The chaparejos, or "chaps," were of the softest leather, with the fringe at the seams generously long; and the silver ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... yellow pressed brick, with clean, upright, unornamented lines. It was filled with the offices of lawyers, doctors, agents for machinery, for emery wheels, for wire fencing, for mining-stock. Their gold signs shone on the windows. The entrance was too modern to be flamboyant with pillars; it was quiet, shrewd, neat. Along the Third Street side were a Western Union Telegraph Office, the Blue Delft Candy Shop, Shotwell's Stationery Shop, and the Babbitt-Thompson ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... when in Chagford, he called at the "Green Man" and made some grave mischief while he sang his master's praises. He extolled the glorious promise of Newtake, and the great improvements already visible thereon; he reflected not a little of Will's own flamboyant manner to the secret entertainment of those gathered in the bar, and presently he drew ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... picked up from Bathurst, with mechanical precision; and Honor, still smiling, went over to the piano—a flamboyant instrument of rosewood and gold. After a second of hesitation Lenox followed, opened it for her, and resting a hand on the gilt back of her chair, bent down to speak to her before she began to play. The suggestion of ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... location he would need the permission of its commander, General George Patton, Groves quickly decided on the second choice, the Jornada del Muerto. This was because General Groves did not want anything to do with the flamboyant Patton, who Groves had once described as "the most disagreeable man I had ever met."[1] Despite being second choice the remote Jornada was a good location for the test, because it provided isolation for secrecy ...
— Trinity [Atomic Test] Site - The 50th Anniversary of the Atomic Bomb • The National Atomic Museum
... and flamboyant qualities must be eradicated from Mr. Grayson. Our young republic cannot afford to be discredited in the eyes of Europe by the sensational or frivolous actions of one who is nominated by a great party for the high ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... and passed Indifferently down, until at last His only kind of grandeur would have been, Apparently, in being seen. He may have had for evil or for good No argument; he may have had no care For what without himself went anywhere To failure or to glory, and least of all For such a stale, flamboyant miracle; He may have been the prophet of an art Immovable to old idolatries; He may have been a player without a part, Annoyed that even the sun should have the skies For such a flaming way to advertise; He may have been a painter sick at heart ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... the ground, grey from the paving of the street, the cavernous porches of the west front opening wide, and marvellous with the shadows of the carving you can only guess at; and above stand the kings, and above that you would see the twined mystery of the great flamboyant rose window with its thousand openings, and the shadows of the flower-work carved round it, then the grey towers and gable, grey against the blue of the August sky, and behind them all, rising high into the quivering air, the tall spire ...
— The World of Romance - being Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856 • William Morris
... turned into the Bois de Boulogne, rushing through the leafy roads at a high speed; a few moments more would see them in the beautiful avenue where stood, isolated from its neighbours, the Villa Pargeter, instinct with flamboyant luxury and that perfection only achieved by the lavish use ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... emphasize the thrill of excited bewilderment they felt, a gorgeous brimstone butterfly sailed carelessly past before their eyes and vanished among the pools of sunlight by the forest edge. Its presence added somehow to the elusive and difficult nature of their search. Its flamboyant beauty was a kind ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... great administrator, who had been wearily turning over the pages of an illustrated weekly chiefly filled with flamboyant photographs of obscure actresses, took his gold glasses from his nose and the black cigar from his lips, ...
— A Christmas Mystery - The Story of Three Wise Men • William J. Locke
... of that hot, still night gathered, weird gleams of phosphorus broke from the steamer's bows and streamed away behind us in long lines of flashing spangles. Where the swell caused by the passage of the ship rose in curling waves, these, as they splashed into mimic breakers, burst into showers of flamboyant light. The water from the discharge-pipe poured down in a cascade, that shone like silver. Every turn of the screw dashed a thousand flashes on either side, and the heaving of the lead was like the flight of a meteor, ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... engagement. On every side luxurious theatres reared their stately facades, box-offices open for business invited all to enter, obstreperous ticket speculators jostled passersby in their eagerness to sell their seats. Street hoardings, ash barrels and sandwich men were plastered with flamboyant multi-colored show bills. The play, and nothing but the play was certainly the thing; the hapless stranger was buffetted in a maelstrom of theatrical activity. The very air reeked of calcium and ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... with his coffee he was entirely himself again. But he was having a reaction. He felt a sort of contemptuous scorn for the talk at the table. The guard down, they were either mouthing flamboyant patriotism or attacking the Government. It had done too much. It had done too little. Voices raised, faces flushed, they wrangled, ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the door burst open, and the boisterous Rosamund Hunt, in her flamboyant white hat, boa, and parasol, stood framed in the doorway. She was in a breathing heat, and on her open face was an expression of the ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... it? Surely he had never sold himself into a more likely or promising service, and that night he dreamt in his sleep that he was become a gentleman's steward, and that at his heels marched an endless company of lacqueys in flamboyant liveries. On the morrow he awoke to the persuasion that at last, of a truth, was his fortune made, and that hereafter there would be no more pike-trailing for ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... reins, so a dull sensibility can only be awakened by the harshest literary appeal. Style in such cases must adapt itself to the subject. Redundant words are heaped up where one would suffice for the trained intelligence. A multitude of violent, flamboyant phrases assist to the excitement of fever. It is possible, indeed, that some rudimentary art-feeling lurks behind this pandemonium of crude literature, more probably in cases where lawlessness is the result ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... wonder at and even admire the mad splendour of the place. Her taste was as crude and flamboyant as herself, but it too had escaped vulgarity which at its worst is imitative of the best, a stupid second-handness, an aggressive insolent self-distrust. She was not ashamed of what she was. She was herself all through, and she trusted herself absolutely. ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... vegetation, indicating what was once here. Its alleys of palms, over two hundred years in age, the thrifty almond-trees, and the gaudy-colored pinons, with their honeysuckle-like bloom, delight the eye. The flamboyant absolutely blazed in its gorgeous flowers, like ruddy flames, all over the grounds. The remarkable fan-palm spread out its branches like a peacock's tail, screening vistas here and there. Through ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... stoves to be had that would permit the fire to be seen and that would look just as cheerful as a grate. He had even seen such a stove in the window of a hardware store downtown, a tiled stove with a brass fender and with curious flamboyant ornaments of cast-iron—a jewel of ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... still amongst the best families some of the Reformed religion. Then in the great Revolution it suffered again; the churches were desecrated, and turned to all manner of common uses; some are being restored, but I myself have seen straw hoisted in at a church window, beautiful with flamboyant tracery in the arch, the shafts ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... while his accustomed weapon was uplifted over a dock-labourer's boot-heel, and this was what that word had done. Pascoe, with a sort of symbolic gesture, rose from his bobbing foot before me, tore the shoe from it, flung it contemptuously on the floor, and approached me with a flamboyant hammer. ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... swallow it up: Edward, for instance, had been forced to buy a new overcoat, the linoleum on the dining-room floor must be renewed, and Lise had had a spell of sickness, losing her position in a flower shop. Afterwards, when she became a saleslady in the Bagatelle, that flamboyant department store in Faber Street, she earned four dollars and a half a week. Two of these were supposed to go into the common fund, but there were clothes to buy; Lise loved finery, and Hannah had not every week the heart to insist. Even when, on an ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... any white linen in evidence; the shirt collar, in particular, being "considered as a mark of the grocer, the bourgeois, the philistine." A certain gilet rouge which Gautier wore when he led the claque at the first performance of "Hernani" has become historic. This flamboyant garment—a defiance and a challenge to the academicians who had come to hiss Hugo's play—was, in fact, a pourpoint or jerkin of cherry-coloured satin, cut in the shape of a Milanese cuirass, pointed, busked, and arched in front, and fastened behind the back with hooks ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... modern French literary society, but it is not difficult to make one's self think that those other days were the days of magnificent friendships between young men of genius. It certainly was a more brilliant time than ours. It was flamboyant, to use one of Gautier's ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... expressed in color had expired, and she decided that a black silk dress, with a heavy gold chain falling along the bosom, was as much as her soul was now entitled to. She had an impatience, amounting to contempt, for those florid flamboyant souls whose outer physical integument so grievously misrepresented them. She thought that after a certain time one should dress the body and not the soul, and, discovering an inseparability between the two, she held that the mean shrine must hold a ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... the open country and the open road at home; they loved also la chasse, as they did tournaments, fetes-champetres and outdoor spectacles of all kinds. Add these stage settings to the splendid costuming and the flamboyant architectural accessories of Renaissance times in France and we have what is assuredly not to be found in other lands, a spectacular and imposing pageant of mediaeval and Renaissance life and manners which is superlative from all points ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... the windows are in triplets, three lights in the central and single lights on either side, decorated with flamboyant tracery. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Carlisle - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. King Eley
... like this. He had walked a good twenty-five miles to-day, and the suggestion of a dark, cool room was delicious. It was a little pinched-looking house, of brick, like the church, squeezed between the church and a large grocery with a flamboyant inscription over its closed shutters. All the windows were open, hung inside with cheap lace curtains, and protected with dust-screens. He pictured the cold food probably laid out within, and his imagination struck into being a tall glass jug of something ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... been very close to Charlie Reynolds, though he had liked the flamboyant Good Guy. Now, it was all a long ways back, besides. Nelsen didn't feel exactly grief. Just an almost mystical bitterness, a shock and an uncertainty, as if he ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... aisles and triforium were originally three lancet-shaped lights under one arch, but were replaced in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by larger windows of a flamboyant character. In the first and second bays on both sides the triforium windows are placed in the inner wall, probably to give more light to the high altar, the position of which was indicated by a boss in the ceiling ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... nineteenth, it would be a good thing for the country. It is wonderful to have witnessed the complete face-about of Canadian public opinion in the short space of six years, this editor shouting as loud as any of his exuberant brethren. Still, as the outlook in Canadian affairs may be regarded as flamboyant, it is worth while quoting the comment of the most critical and conservative newspaper in the world,—the London Times. The Times says: "Without doubt the expansion of Canada is the greatest political event in the British Empire to-day. The empire is face to face with ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... "When the history of this war is written, Ambrose, with flamboyant phrases and copious rhetoric, there will be unwritten chapters, more dramatic, having really more direct effect upon the final issue than even the great battles which have seemed the dominant factors. Sit tight here, Ambrose, and wait. I may ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... adorned than most other buildings, because they were safer from violence, and were the fitting subjects of devotional offering: but they were never built in any separate, mystical, and religious style; they were built in the manner that was common and familiar to everybody at the time. The flamboyant traceries that adorn the faade of Rouen Cathedral had once their fellows in every window of every house in the market place; the sculptures that adorn the porches of St. Mark's had once their match on the walls, of every palace on the Grand Canal; and the only difference ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... to the passage from Henry VIII in which the humbled Cardinal says: "Farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness." It is one of the pathetic passages of literature. A man uttering such a sentiment would be crushed, and the last thing on earth he would do would be to make flamboyant movements. Yet this class had an elocutionary manual before them that gave an appropriate gesture for every occasion, from paying the gas bill to death-bed farewells. So they were instructed to throw their arms out at full length on each side and say: "Farewell, ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... thrift and importance by actual contact with some great thoroughfare of travel, their old quietude is exploded; a mushroom station has sprung up; mushroom villas flank all the hills; the girls wear mushroom hats. A turreted monster of a chapel from some flamboyant tower bellows out its Sunday warning to a new set of church-goers. There is a little coterie of "superior intelligences," who talk of the humanities, and diffuse their airy rationalism over here and there ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... maid-servant bringing in a card distractedly left the parlor-door open, and there was seen bowing toward Mrs. Meyrick a figure quite unlike that of the respected Premier—tall and physically impressive even in his kid and kerseymere, with massive face, flamboyant hair, and gold spectacles: in fact, as Mrs. Meyrick saw from ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... may become lovelier still, associated with those shapes of grace, those rich gorgeous tints, and all the religious symbolism of that in art which has borrowed and bears its name. After this it were little to note the imagination, although that was most real, which dictated the term 'flamboyant' to express the wavy flame-like outline, which, at a particular period of art, the tracery in the ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... be improved by such active and ardent worshippers as the Freemasons. Thus originated Gothic tracery, which afterwards branched out into such sumptuous and unrestrained luxury as we find in the Decorated styles of England, the Flamboyant of France, the late Geometric of Germany. Thus were the masons true to the zealous and passionate enthusiasm of their religion. They used foliations, not on account of their subjective significance, as the Greek artists did, but on account of their objective and material applicability ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... came at the end of the third week. It came in the form of a message crouched in the flamboyant phraseology beloved of the Communist fraternity. It was conveyed by a small youth some ten years of age, as though its authors were fearful lest a full grown bearer should be made to suffer ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... the Fives Court and cheered with intention. In his absence not less than half the school invaded the infected dormitory to draw their own conclusions. The cat had gained in the last twelve hours, but a battlefield of the fifth day could not have been so flamboyant as ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... recognized as an important architectural feature, and was of considerable elevation in consequence of the great height of the roofs. In the chateau of Meillant (1503) the chimney shafts are decorated with angle buttresses, niches and canopies, in the late Flamboyant style; and at Chambord and Blois they are carved with pilasters and niches with panelling above, carved with the salamander and other armorial devices. In the Roman palaces they are sometimes masked by the balustrades, and (when shown) take the form of sepulchral urns, as if to disguise their ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... arrive safely in Paris, with the contents of the national treasury as their baggage. They did not hunger after honours, such as knighthoods, or aspire to speak at Sunday afternoon gathering in pseudo-places of worship. Certainly, they told a number of flamboyant falsehoods before getting into office, but that was the only respect in which they copied civilised political methods; and they did run a risk from which their English counterparts would have shrunk in a cold sweat of fear. The price ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... took his troops to Asia, left them there under the charge of King Louis VII of France, and returned to his own country via Constantinople, where he indulged in a little intriguing with the Greek Emperor Emanuel. This seems to have given the flamboyant Greeks the impression that Bohemia's King had become a vassal of their Emperor; they were disillusioned some years later when Vladislav assisted Stephen III on to the throne of Hungary against the Emperor ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... "I wonder at his moderation. Had I been in his place I should have asked more, for really the style is a little flamboyant. Well, we don't want to quarrel with them just now—feed the sharks. But surely, Jeffreys, you didn't come to disturb me ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... window, the gables above it, and the middle windows of the towers of the later or curvilinear Decorated; and the towers above the roof, Perpendicular of the fifteenth century. The central gable and the great west window are almost flamboyant in their decoration. A battlement immediately above the central window runs right across the front. The niches on the buttresses are in four storeys, and those on the central part of the front in six, of ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... for instance, it was never in his power to become. For he has never possessed the creative heat, the fluency, the vein, the felicity, the power necessary to the task of upbuilding out of the tones of instruments anything as flamboyant and magnificent as the novelist's black and red edifices. He has never been vivid and ingenuous and spontaneous enough a musician even to develop a personal idiom. He has always been hampered and bound. His earlier compositions, the quintet, the orchestral "Les Vieillees ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... Bronte heroine, dingily dressed, badly educated, hampered by a humiliating inexperience, a kind of ugly innocence, is yet, by the very fact of her solitude and her gaucherie, full of the greatest delight that is possible to a human being, the delight of expectation, the delight of an ardent and flamboyant ignorance. She serves to show how futile it is of humanity to suppose that pleasure can be attained chiefly by putting on evening dress every evening, and having a box at the theatre every first night. It is not the man of pleasure who has pleasure; it is not the man of the world who appreciates ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... In spite of our repeatedly explained preference for realism to romance, Europe persisted in resounding with the name of Byron. And just when we had made it perfectly clear to the French that we despised all their flamboyant tricks, that we were a plain prosaic people and there was no fantastic glory or chivalry about us, the very shaft we sent against them shone with the name of Nelson, a shooting and ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... High and graceful arches. Deep moulding to pillars. Convex moulding to capitals with natural foliage. "Ball flower" ornament. Elaborate and flamboyant window tracery. ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... go, Miss Tancred—let yourself go!" And he laughed at his own vision of Miss Tancred; Miss Tancred insurgent, Miss Tancred flamboyant, Miss Tancred ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... all the roads and the woods within ten miles of town—and "could be seen in the wonderful menagerie that formed a part of the grand aggregation," and so the announcement ran on, after the customary flamboyant manner of circus posters ...
— Chums of the Camp Fire • Lawrence J. Leslie
... arguing with myself as to whether I were right and this poet wrong or this poet right and I wrong in our view of love and women. I was accosted in the plain highway by a dapper little brat of a page that wore a very flamboyant livery, and that carried a letter in his hand. And the page questioned me with a grin and asked me if I were Messer Lappo Lappi, and I, being so bewildered with the burden of my warring thoughts, was half of a mind to answer that I was no such man, ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... long parlour, the back parlour or library, the high stuccoed ceilings—not only were these alike in all the houses, but the furnishings, too, were apt to be of a sameness in them all, rather heavy and tasteless, but serving the ends that such things should be meant to serve, and never flamboyant. Of these relics of a simpler day not many survive to us, save in the shameful degeneracy of boarding-houses. But in such as are left, we may confidently expect to find the traditions of that more dignified time kept unsullied;—to ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... florid, flamboyant, talkative, who spoke with a faint brogue, and who tagged every observation, argument, or remark with the phrase, "Do you understand me, gen'lemen?" Freye, a German-American, was a quiet fellow, very handsome, with black side whiskers and a ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... rarely, the child's selection was evident on the woman. As a rule Mrs. Condon garbed her flamboyant body in large and expensive patterns or extremely tailored suits; and of the two, the evening satins and powdered arms barely retaining an admissible line, and the suits, the latter were ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and concertos thus became the fashion at Appledore, and classical music was in good demand. Its refining and quieting influence on the little community was quite perceptible. It produced a change like the transition from flamboyant Gothic architecture to the pure Grecian style. At first only a few came to hear it: then the parlor was filled. The piazza became crowded, and finally gentlemen were obliged to find places on ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... Besides, Mrs. Ascher is not the kind of woman who allows strange men to make love to her. She is, in essentials, far less emancipated than she thinks. It is just possible that he finds her responsive to his fondness for the more flamboyant kinds of rhetoric. Gorman really likes talking about Ireland as an oppressed and desolated land. It is easy enough to move large audiences to enthusiasm by that kind of oratory. It is not so easy, I imagine, to get single, sympathetic listeners ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... trees So thickly set, the belfry's face Was leaf-veiled, while above them pierced, Four slender spires flamboyant grace. Old porches carven when the trees, Were seedlings yellow in the sun Five hundred years ago that bright Upon ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... that I received a long, overflowing letter, full of flamboyant oddities, written from London. Two or three hours later came a telegram. "Burn letter. Blot it from ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... point. I incline to the latter opinion. This subterranean church or crypt is necessarily lighted from one end only, where it is flush with the face of the rock; and these openings are filled with Flamboyant windows, which are very evident insertions. On the surface of the hill over this church, but with a large space of solid rock intervening, is the tower and spire belonging to it. The tower is of late Norman and Transitional ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... [109-*] The Flamboyant window, common in France, is not often met with in this country. On the north side of Salford Church, Warwickshire, is, however, a window of this description, filled with ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... position in life... Did he belong to the middle class, and, granting the premises, was it a condition from which one could escape or a fixed heritage that could neither be abandoned nor denied? In a country that made flamboyant motions toward democracy, he knew that the term was used in contempt, if not reproach. Had the class itself brought on this disesteem? Did it really exist and what defined it? Was it a matter of scant worldly ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... went upstairs without him, and were shown into the best room of the inn, where they were received by the officer lolling in an armchair, his heels on the chimney-piece, smoking a long porcelain pipe, and arrayed in a flamboyant dressing-gown, taken, no doubt, from the abandoned dwelling-house of some bourgeois of inferior taste. He did not rise, he vouchsafed them no greeting of any description, he did not even look at them—a brilliant sample of the victorious ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... peace, except over one flamboyant many-winged building of red brick and white stone with a garden about it, an avenue—a Capetown avenue, shady trees and cool but not large: attractive and not imposing—at one side of it, with a statue of the Queen before and broad-flagged ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... that Wheeler did not grin, as Nasmyth certainly did. What Gordon had said was, no doubt, a trifle flamboyant, but it expressed the views of others in the West, and after all it was more or less warranted. Mattawa, however, gazed at them both as if such matters were beyond him, and Wheeler, who turned ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... enough to manage them intelligently. The masculine mind is readily taken in by specious values; the average married man of Protestant Christendom, if he succumbs at all, succumbs to some meretricious and flamboyant creature, bent only upon fleecing him. Here is where the harsh realism of the Frenchman shows its superiority to the sentimentality of the men of the Teutonic races. A Frenchman would no more think of taking a mistress without consulting his wife than ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... away all the time. But what I mean about Vetch is simply that he has set me thinking. He does that, you know. Oh, I admit that he is mistaken—or downright wrong—in a number of ways! He is too sensational for our taste—too flamboyant; but one can't get away from him. He has shaken the dust from us; he has jolted us into movement. I have a feeling somehow that his personality is spread all over the place—that we are smeared with Gideon Vetch, as the darkeys ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... was soft, but when I looked at him, I saw a tawny spark in his black eyes. Vandeman fronted him with the flamboyant embroidered monogram on his shirt sleeve, the carefully careless tie, the utterly good clothes, and, most of all, at the moment, the smug satisfaction in his face of social and human security. I thought of what that ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... delayed; it came in the form of a newspaper despatch to the effect that his Cortez bank had suspended payment because of a run started by the dissatisfied employees of the railroad. Through Gordon's flamboyant advertising his enterprises were so well known by this time that the story was featured despite his efforts to kill it. His frantic cables to Cortez for a denial only brought assurances that the report was true and that conditions would not mend unless a shipment of currency ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... Through the great gates that had hung before Miramar since it had been the palace of the Spanish Governor-General, and through which four horses could pass abreast, he had peered at the beautiful gardens. He had wondered at the moss-covered statues, at the orchids on the flamboyant trees, with their flowers of scarlet, at the rare plants, now neglected and trailing riotously across the paths, choked with unkempt weeds. Not an hour before, when he had parted from Inez, he had determined to make sentimental ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... daughters sailed for Lisbon. She was presented at court there; concerning which occasion she wrote a lengthy and very interesting account to her husband, published in her son's biography. The King of Portugal held a long conversation with her and Minister O'Sullivan, and she describes him as dressed in a flamboyant manner,—a scarlet uniform, lavishly ornamented with diamonds. With how much better taste did the Empress of Austria receive the President of the French Republic,—in a simple robe of black velvet, fastened at her throat with a diamond ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... disappearing when he was wanted, especially when he was wanted by the police. It may be added that his disappearances were more dangerous than his appearances. In the latter he seldom went beyond the sensational—pasting up seditious placards, tearing down official placards, making flamboyant speeches, or unfurling forbidden flags. But in order to effect the former he would sometimes fight for his freedom with startling energy, from which men were sometimes lucky to escape with a broken head instead of a broken neck. His most famous feats of escape, ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... attached them to Byzantium; and it was the sudden passion for stained glass and the goldsmith's love of intricate fineness—which the Saracens also had shown—that carried them in a century from Romanesque to flamboyant. The structure was but the inevitable underpinning for the desired display. If these sanctuaries, in their spoliation and ruin, now show us their admirable bones, we should thank nature for that rational skeleton, imposed by material conditions on an art which in its life-time was ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... white frost hung heavy upon all the bending grasses and the broad-leafed plants, a frost which seared the maize leaves and set aflame the foliage of the maples all along the streams, and decked in a hundred flamboyant tones the leaves of the sumach and all the ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... sounded at his door. Thinking Judkins had returned, he called, "Come in"; but instead of Judkins the opening door admitted the belligerent young man in rumpled evening clothes of the previous night. Now he wore a silk dressing-gown of a flamboyant peacock blue, his feet showed bare in toe slippers, his wavy, yellowish hair had the tousled effect of a very recent separation from a pillow. A cigarette depended from the ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... Brown can get up that good a show without even trying, what couldn't she accomplish if she put her mind on it? I believe I like yours better than Pierce's," said Mr. Kinsella. "His was so flamboyant, while yours has a certain ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... apse. To see the facade, stand well back opposite it, where you can observe that the chapel is built in four main stories—those, namely, of the Lower Church or crypt, of the Upper Church, of the great rose window (with later flamboyant tracery), and of the gable-end, partially masked by an open parapet studded with the royal fleurs-de-lis of France. The Crown of Thorns surrounds the two pinnacles ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... unnecessary to remind readers that the famous blades of Damascus were forged from Indian steel. Some of the blades are watered, others chased in half relief with hunting-scenes—some serrated, others flamboyant. A very striking object is a suit of armor of the horny scales of the Indian armadillo, ornamented with encrusted gold, turquoises and garnets. Another suit is of Kashmir chain-armor almost as fine as lace. Others have damascened breastplates, the gold wire being inserted in undercut lines ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... gilded frames and many mirrors similarly encircled with gilded wood. The grate, fender and fire-irons were of polished brass, and round the walls were numerous electric lamps with yellow shades. The whole room represented a bizarre appearance, flamboyant and rather tropical in looks. Apparently Miss Loach was fond of vivid colors. There was no piano, nor were there books or papers, and the only evidence as to how Miss Loach passed her time revealed itself in a work-basket ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... flamboyant, I can assure you, Andrew," he replied; "nor shall I play the amateur detective with his mouth open for mysteries. But listen," he went on earnestly. "I've had some experience, as you know, and, notwithstanding ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... up with Thackeray and Tennyson, with whom he shares a certain Grandeur of Soul and Body. As you guess, the colouring is (when the Man is all well) as fine as his form: the finest Saxon type: with that complexion which Montaigne calls 'vif, male, et flamboyant'; blue eyes; and strictly auburn hair, that any woman might sigh to possess. He says it is coming off, as it sometimes does from those who are constantly wearing the close hot Sou'westers. We must see what can be ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... The flamboyant rhetoric of the American Declaration of Independence—"We hold these truths to be self-evident—that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights; that among ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... Flamboyant arch and high-enscrolled War-sculpture, big, Napoleonic— Fierce chargers, angels histrionic; The royal sweep of gardened spaces, The pomp and whirl of columned Places; The Rive Gauche, age-old, gay and gray; The impasse and the loved cafe; The tempting ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... meanest stable, and all around it were hundreds upon hundreds of frangipanni blooms—the white and gold temple flowers of the East—giving forth of scent and color all that a flower is capable, to alleviate the miserable blot of human construction. Now and then a flamboyant tree comes into view, and as, at night, the head-lights of an approaching car eclipse all else, so this tree of burning scarlet draws eye and mind from adjacent human-made squalor. In all the tropics of the world ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... might be called the chorus, were in twelve sets, each group clad in a different colour or design of feather-silk. Their head-dress, while composed of the entire body of a bird of plumage, lacked the flamboyant tail of the peacock. The music was weird and whimsical, as there were neither stringed nor brass instruments. It was made wholly by women playing upon a vast variety of drums and reeds. There were all sizes of whistling reeds or flutes; several of these of different ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... the right, just before she turned up to the village on the left, the grocer's shop, with the name "Nugent" in capitals as bright and flamboyant as on the depot of a merchant king. Mr. Nugent could be faintly descried within, in white shirt-sleeves and an apron, busied at a pile of cheeses. Overhead, three pairs of lace curtains, each decked with ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... left me holding the sack in a mighty poor snipe country. Dark was close at hand, and I was a long way from shelter. So when the creeping shadows blanketed pinnacle and lowland alike, and all that remained of the sun was the flamboyant crimson-yellow on the gathering clouds, I was astride of my dun caballo and heading for Pend ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... She was convinced of the genuineness of the emotion which expressed itself in all this flamboyant behaviour. And she had to make excuses to herself on behalf of Chirac. She smiled to give him pleasure. The hard commonsense in her might sneer, but indubitably she was the centre of a romantic episode. The balloon darkly swinging there! The men waiting! ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett |
