"Old French" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... leaving you my small library of erotic literature, five or six hundred pieces, worth a couple of thousand, I should say. Some wonderful old French stuff, and as many Rops as you like, and Persian and Chinese things—I can see you gloating over them! Don't thank me. And now I'm ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... reason. It cannot be said, however, that the necessity of this qualification has been invariably recognised by enthusiastic inquirers into the history of instruments played with a bow. We have a curious instance of its non-recognition in a treatise on the Viol,[1] written by a distinguished old French Violist named Jean Rousseau. The author, bent upon going to the root of his subject, begins with the Creation, and speaks of Adam as a Violist. Perhaps Rousseau based his belief in the existence of Fiddling at this early period ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... late, so I retraced my steps and cantered homewards. In this war-scarred region I actually met an old French farmer driving his horse and trap along the road leading towards the trenches just as if there was no war raging; and near the one habitable house of the district small boys were playing merrily, while their parents were calling them in and scolding them in shrill ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... only stay in the garden with the thin visaged old French woman who taught her to read and to write and to embroider and to play upon an old lute and to curtsy and to dance. One thing she learned that the French woman did not teach her—to whistle! She remembers answering the sea-gulls who mewed outside in the harbor and ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... His passion was more particularly for Aldines, and other early books bearing the insignia of celebrities, such as Frances I., Henri et Diane, and De Thou, and especially of choice old morocco bindings by Desseuil, Padeloup, and Derome. He was especially strong in old French and Italian books, generically classified as facetiae. Beckford would read for days and weeks at a stretch, with no more recreation than an occasional ride. That he read his books there is ample testimony, for at his ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... part of the nation, both the good and the bad qualities which are favored by court life had reached a high degree of development. The old French nobility has sometimes been represented as exhibiting the best of manners and the worst of morals. I believe that both sides of the picture have been painted in too high colors. The courtier was not always polite, nor were all great nobles libertines. Faithful ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... militaire!" sighed the old French song, no doubt with a touch of frivolity; but the sentiment moves us all. Sages have thought the army worth preserving for a dash of scarlet and a roll of the kettledrum; in every State procession it is the implements of death and ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... with the object of endeavoring to disprove and discredit these stories that the emperor caused a telegram, to be sent to the czar from Hubertusstock, not written, as usual, in cipher, but in ordinary language. There is an old French proverb according to which "he who seeks to prove too much, proves nothing," and thus it happened that this open telegram which reached the czar at Chalons, and which was published in the German newspapers, even before Nicholas had made it known to the members of his entourage, ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... silent, but with a tongue in each head to propose a toast to host and hostess. From over the ridge, from French Valley, from as far east as St. Croix and as far west as Dunvegan's Post, the guests trooped in. Miners, trappers, little stock men; scions of old French families with grand names, descendants of younger English sons with riotous blood, Americans who had crossed the border with much haste and scant baggage; many men whom the world had outlawed and whom the North Woods had accepted as empire builders; ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... the consul, and I shared the table d'hote with three tearful old French ladies, each of whom had husband or son at the front. That would seem to have been enough without being shelled at home. It is a commonplace, but it is nevertheless true that in war it is the women who suffer. The proprietress walked around the table, ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... said Peter, with a touch of his father's pomposity. "Surely a bride has a right to look forward to arranging her home as she chooses. And Sarah is mad about old French furniture—Louis Seize, I think it is—but I know nothing about such things. I think a man should leave the choice of furniture, and all that, to his wife—especially when her taste happens to be as ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... complained. "I thought you were telling the story of Flush of Gold. I don't want a biography of your old French wine-bibber." ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... "are by universal consent among the most attractive works of the Middle Ages." They comprize one of the oldest extant examples of French prose. The passage here given was translated for this collection from the old French by Eric Arthur Bell. A translation by T. Smith was ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... distinguished judge was at this moment a living embodiment of the law which ought to supply us with the noblest examples of civic courage. In this brief instant he was on a level with the magistrates of the old French Parlement in the time of the civil wars, when the presidents found themselves face to face with death, and stood, made of marble, like the statues that ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... ensued in the town was something pandemoniacal. Only three drums were found, but tin kettles and pans were not wanting, and these, superintended by Hugh Barr, the town drummer, did great execution. Three key-bugles, an old French horn, and a tin trumpet of a mail-coach guard, were sounded at intervals in every quarter of the town, while the men were marshalled, and made to march hither and thither in detached bodies, as if all were busily engaged in making preparations ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... were rare, the girl of eighteen made her new husband provide her with white-panelled walls, lightly gilt, and with a Persian carpet of which the mass was of a plain, blackish gray, and only the border was allowed to flower. A few Louis-Quinze girandoles on the walls, a Vernis-Martin screen, an old French clock, two or three inlaid cabinets, and a collection of lightly built chairs and settees in the French mode—this was all she would allow; and while Lady Tranmore's room was always crowded, Kitty's, which was ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... by M. Zola. I suspect that they largely owed their origin to the form and dimensions of the ordinary Parisian kitchen stove, which did not enable people to roast poultry at home in a convenient way. In the old French cuisine, moreover, roast joints of meat were virtually unknown; roasting was almost entirely confined to chickens, geese, turkeys, pheasants, etc.; and among the middle classes people largely bought their poultry already cooked of the rotisseur, or else confided it to him for the purpose ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... John Berwoit (?) and William Talbot, subordinator to Gris. These men commanded a set of soldiers called houspilleurs, placed in the cell of the prisoner day and night. According to J. Bellow's pocket dictionary, the term houspilleur is derived from the old French term houspiller—Ang. 'to worry.' And these fellows certainly carried out that meaning of ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... of Indian chiefs, the dusky loveliness of Indian girls, the domestic life of wigwams, the stealthy march, the battle beneath gloomy pine trees, the frontier fortress with its garrison, the anomaly of the old French partisan bred in courts, but grown gray in shaggy deserts,—such were the scenes and portraits that he had sketched. The glow of perilous moments, flashes of wild feeling, struggles of fierce power, love, hate, grief, frenzy—in a word, all the worn-out heart of the old earth—had ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... you were on the ice, and that you didn't know about the big breaking-up, and she cried to us that the wind was off shore and the rift widening. She cried over and over again that you could come in by the old French creek if ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... us. We therefore heard much of their conversation. Directly General Howard joined them. I well remember his remarks concerning the behavior of his corps on the previous afternoon. His chagrin was punctured with the advice of old French to shoot a few dozen of them for example's sake. Naturally, the chief subject of their conversation related to the present situation. It was perfectly clear they regarded it as very critical. We could hear heavy cannonading in ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... fabliau, and lai, are so often used indifferently by the old French writers, that it is difficult to lay down any positive rule for discriminating between them. But I believe the word roman particularly applies to such works as were to be supposed strictly historical: such are the romances of Arthur, ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... The floor was of redwood diligently polished, and adorned, not covered, by one or two skins brought by some of Colonel Barrington's younger neighbors from the Rockies. There were two basket chairs and a plain redwood table; but in contrast to them a cabinet of old French workmanship stood in one corner bearing books in dainty bindings, and two great silver candlesticks. The shaded lamp was also of the same metal, and the whole room with its faint resinous smell conveyed, in a fashion not uncommon on the ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... one day, that I was invited to dine at the house of an aristocratic subject of the old French regime. I did not know the family, and a previous engagement tempted me to decline the invitation; but one of those mysterious impulses which are in fact the messengers of Destiny compelled me to go, and I went. Thus slight may be the thread ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the Hotel d'Europe—that well-named hostelry which has probably seen more history made from its windows than any other hotel in Europe. We favoured it always on Sunday when we could, for not only was a particularly nice tea to be had, but one could also read there a not too old French newspaper. I think just at first we felt almost as cut off from news of what was happening on the English side as we did in Belgium. No English or French papers could be bought and the Polish and Russian papers were as sealed books to us, and when ...
— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan
... the fire, he was so much at his ease that he was almost flat on his back. She had evidently roused him from sleep, and it took him a couple of minutes—during which, without again looking at him, she directly approached a beautiful old French secretary, a fine piece of the period of Louis Seize—to justify his presence. "I changed my ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... century, in the vigorous times of the old French wars, there was a Monsieur Appert, who had his attention directed to the preservation of things that ordinarily perish, such as meats and vegetables, and in fact he laid the foundation of our modern method of preserving ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... features in the shape of proofs before letters and vignettes taken off separately, besides extra engravings by other artists not strictly belonging to the edition, until you have a complete album of bijoux indiscrets, and in the old French morocco by Derome or Bozerian a L200 lot. The Earl of Crawford's copy, which was to have been sold at Sotheby's in July 1896 (No. 493 of catalogue), was a masterpiece of this description; but it was withdrawn. It has since been sold ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... hitherto mistaken her rights, but would do so no more. Then the ancient bond of brotherhood would again have been knit together as firmly as in old times. The habit of loyalty which had grown as strong as instinct was not utterly overcome. The perils shared, the victories won in the Old French War, when the soldiers of the colonies fought side by side with their comrades from beyond the sea, were unforgotten yet. England was still that beloved country which the colonists called their home. King George, though he had frowned upon America, was ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... her dowry in money was a hundred thousand ducats. A ducat was a gold piece of the size of an old French louis, though less thick. (The old louis was worth twenty-four francs—the present one is worth twenty). The Comtes of Auvergne and Lauraguais were also made a part of the dowry, and Pope Clement added one hundred thousand ducats in jewels, precious stones, and ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... who formed the chief element in the new government, were even at this time a peculiar people. Planted in the days of the old French monarchy, and cut off by conquest from the parent state long before the Revolution of 1789, their little community remained for many years like a fragment or boulder of a distinct formation—an island enshrining ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... There is an old French proverb which says, Tout vient a point a qui sait attendre, and this may be roughly interpreted, "Everything comes to the man who waits." Let's suppose that it comes to ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... temperament. Whatever the cause, the effect is undeniable. The skilled and dainty pessimism of De Maupassant was accompanied by a vigor and physique very unusual. His sensations are in turn those of a hunter and of a sailor, who have, as the old French saying expressively puts it, "swift foot, eagle eye," and who are attuned to all ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... just below the town, is Carlton Island, on which stand the ruins of an old French fortification, the walls and trenches and the solitary chimneys, from which the wooden barracks have rotted or been burned away, remain as melancholy testimonials of the bloody strifes between the red men of the forest, and the pioneers of civilization who were driving them from ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... or a Scandinavian worker in iron, or an old French worker in thread, could produce indeed beautiful design out of nothing but groups of knots and spirals: but you, when you are rightly educated, may render your knots and spirals infinitely more interesting by making them suggestive of natural ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... Histoires.—I find I have a note on that handsome old French work, La Mer des Histoires, which is commonly attributed to Johannes de Columna, Archbishop of Messina; but upon which Francis Douce, while taking notice of its being a translation of the Rudimentum Noviciorum ascribed to Mochartus, observes that it is a different work from the Mare Historiarum ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 18. Saturday, March 2, 1850 • Various
... of to-day wouldn't go so far as this old Briton. The game as played to-day offers very little danger to life and not much more to limb. Of course, accidents happen now and then, but that's true of every game. The old French proverb says that 'he who risks nothing, has nothing.' The element of risk in football is more than counterbalanced by the character it develops. The whole secret of success in life is to 'never say die.' And I don't know of any game that teaches this as well as football. But ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... settled by Cambro-Britons. Out of our Bibles we got thirty-three Hebrew appellations, nearly all ludicrously inappropriate; and these we have been very fond of repeating. In California, New Mexico, Texas, Florida, and the Louisiana purchase, we bought our names along with the land. Fine old French and Spanish ones they are; some thirty of them names of Saints, all well-sounding and pleasant to the ear. And there is a value in these names not at first perceptible. Most of them serve to mark the day of the year upon which the town was founded. They are commemorative dates, which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... grass-green plumes for you, like Queen Guinevere's, nor yet the free flowing feather to be seen in so many beautiful old French pictures, nor the plumed hat which "my sweet Mistress Ann Dacre" wore when Constance Sherwood's loving eyes first fell upon her, but the simple jockey cap, exactly matching your habit, and costing two dollars and a half or three dollars; the Derby cap ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... find the Citadel, the old French fort, but the wharves and docks run out in the river, and there are steamboats, instead of canoes. There is the Market Place and the City Hall, the Grande Allee St. Louis Place and Gate, the crowded business-point, with ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... discipline prevailed. Marie Antoinette found that she could have her own way in many things, and she chose to enjoy life without regard to ceremony. Her escapades at first would have been thought mild enough had she not been a "daughter of France"; but they served to shock the old French king, and likewise, perhaps even more, her own ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... possess marvellous seductions, and are irresistible in the art of wheedling. The Holy Father himself converses now with one, now with the other, and addresses each as "My dear General!" A soldier must be very ungrateful, very badly taught, and have fallen off sadly from the old French chivalry, if he refuses to let himself be killed at the gates of the Vatican where his vanity has been so ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... Supposing that thou gav'st us nothing more. Yet, thus surrounded, Life, dear Life, I'm thine, And, could I always call thee mine, I would not quickly bid this world farewell; But whether here, or long or short my stay, I'll keep in mind for ev'ry day An old French motto, "Vive la bagatelle!" Misfortunes are this lottery-world's sad blanks; Presents, in my opinion, not worth thanks. The pleasures are the twenty thousand prizes, Which nothing but ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... W. A. Craigie. Those from the Sicilian (through the German) are translated, like the African tales (through the French) and the Catalan tales, and the Japanese stories (the latter through the German), and an old French story, by Mrs. Lang. Miss Alma Alleyne did the stories from Andersen, out of the German. Mr. Ford, as usual, has drawn the monsters and mermaids, the princes and giants, and the beautiful princesses, ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... time he climbed up the cramp-irons riveted in the walls to this store-room, the inspection of which he had reserved to himself. He arranged and re-arranged, plunged his hand rapidly into certain mysterious boxes, singing all the time in a voice very out of tune some old French ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... the pommes de terre to be peeled, washed and sliced to the exact size of centuries old French fry. Monsieur was permitted to assist her in this, and wielded the keen bladed knife with precision. Then there was the salad and the seasoning of it to just that degree of the "delicieux" the palate revels in. With the ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... pour in great numbers into the Mantuan. In the beginning of May, count Merci, who commanded them, passed the Po in the face of the allies, notwithstanding all the skill of Villars, obliged him to retreat from the banks of that river, and took the castle of Colorno. The old French general being taken ill, quitted the army, and retired to Turin, where in a little time he died; and the king of Sardinia retiring to the same place, the command of the allied forces devolved upon the mareschal de Coigny. The confederates were posted at Sanguina, and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... quarrel presently grew fiercer between Monsieur Jacquin La Roulie, the old French whipper-in, and John Barry, the young islander. The two princes guessed from afar the subject of the altercation, and the Master of the Hunt, setting spurs to his horse, brought it to an end by saying, in a ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... our old cripple (he would swear sometimes and tipple), He had heard the bullets whistle (in the old French war) before,— Calls out in words of jeering, just as if they all were hearing,— And his wooden leg thumps fiercely on ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... London in the publication of several literary reviews, notably the Censor americano (1820), the Biblioteca americana (1823) and the Repertorio americano (1826-27), and in these he published many of his most important works. Here appeared his studies of Old French and of the Song of My Cid, his excellent translation of fourteen cantos of Boiardo's Orlando innamorato, several important articles on Spanish syntax and prosody, and the best of all his ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... "the old French priest was not so far out of the way, when he said, in his coarse dialect, that the dance is the Devil's procession; and paint and ornaments, the whetting of the devil's sword; and the ring that is made in dancing, the devil's grindstone, ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... party to explore Otter Creek; another to explore South Bay, which was already well known; another to make a road across what is now the State of Vermont, from Crown Point to Charlestown, or "Number Four," on the Connecticut; and another to widen and improve the old French road between Crown Point and Ticonderoga. His industry was untiring; a great deal of useful work was done: but the essential task of making a diversion to aid the army of ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... things in which the church had its own way during the ages of truth. Must not the system have been wrong, when it had so lost all moral weight as to be at the mercy of a ruffianly plunderer? And so, as we all admit now, the strongest condemnation of the old French regime is the fact that it had not only produced such a set of miscreants as those who have cast permanent odium even upon sound principles; but that its king and rulers went down before them without even an attempt at manly resistance. A revolution does not, perhaps, justify ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Bristol man born, and learned his trade on board of sundry privateers in the East Indies during the old French war—that of 1702—and a better apprenticeship could no man serve. At last, somewhere about the latter part of the year 1716, a privateering captain, one Benjamin Hornigold, raised him from the ranks ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... used in these pages, and which is so familiar to one who has lived much with Indians as to need no explanation, is the phrase to count coup. Like many of the terms common in the Northwest, this one comes down to us from the old French trappers and traders, and a coup is, of course, a blow. As commonly used, the expression is almost a direct translation of the Indian phrase to strike the enemy, which is in ordinary use among all tribes. This striking is the literal inflicting a ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... the beautiful "Garden District" which they had been warned not to miss. They found, indeed, much to delight them in the stately, palatial homes set in the midst of exquisitely kept lawns and wonderful groves of magnolia and oak. Quite as interesting to them all, however, was the old French or Latin Quarter below Canal Street, where were the Creole homes and business houses. Here they ate their luncheon, too, in one of the curious French restaurants, famous the world over ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... together through that mellow light towards where unseen among the clustered downs the old French ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... stone with an inscription running round the edge, in old French, as follows: "Ci git Maud de Burgh la veuve comitisse de Gloucestre et Hertford, que mourust le 2 juillet l'ann grace 1315. Nous cherchons celle que est a venir." This slab, which is of large size, covers a well-wrought stone grave, and must have contained a very handsome brass, judging by the matrix. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... what has led to the supposition that this name denotes the magpie. It may possibly be traced to the same root as that of a cognate species, the cornix frugivora; Roeck, Germ., according to Gesner; Friesic, roek; Ang.-S. hroc, the rook: but I am at a loss to discover anything similar in old French to explain the occurrence of the termination, which seems to be a popular or familiar diminutive, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 41, Saturday, August 10, 1850 • Various
... is called "The Rose of Quebec." The picturesque life of this old French city, as seen through the eyes of the ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... Old English wicce, but wizard is from the Old French guiscart (prudent), not immediately connected with witch, though both are ultimately from ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... possible to be sapient and not know it," Gus said. "Like the character in the old French play who didn't know he ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... shelling, and it was very disappointing to hear of our own men, like C.S.M. Shields, Sgt. Tabbron, etc., who had been left behind as battle surplus, going down gassed. Fortunately, most of them rejoined the battalion later. During this day's fighting some L.F's. were staggered to find an old French woman in a cellar in Bucquoy, and they had the utmost difficulty in persuading her to leave her "home." That was her abode and she was prepared to live in it whatever ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... eminent Doctors of the Church from their chairs, became alienated from Catholicity in proportion as they cherished the spirit of resistance, and, unhappily, imbibed the fatal conviction that to overthrow the despot's throne they must break down the altar. Rightly interpreted, the old French Revolution, although bitterly anti-Catholic and infidel, was not so much hatred of religion, and impatience of her salutary restraints, as the indignant uprising of a misgoverned people against a civil despotism that affected ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... resources, the amount assigned to each being levied by the local assembly on the principles most acceptable to the locality, and paid en bloc into the national treasury. A practice approaching to this existed even in the old French monarchy, so far as regarded the pays d'tats, each of which, having consented or been required to furnish a fixed sum, was left to assess it upon the inhabitants by its own officers, thus escaping the grinding despotism of ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... name of this once powerful tribe of Indians. The term Sioux is not recognized, except among those who live near the whites. It is said to have been given by the old French traders, that the Dahcotahs might not know when they were the subjects of conversation. The exact meaning of the word has ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... different writers differ from one another, but various ways of representing the same sound were used by the same writer. The earlier spelling shows a certain amount of Welsh, old English, and old French affinities; the latest is evidently modelled on modern English, which does not suit it very well, and the transition from one to the other is not very abrupt. It is the object of the present book to represent the probable pronunciation of Modern Cornish ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... a different general idea for each one of the four decades which immediately followed the conquest of Canada. In the sixties the general idea was to kill refractory old French ways with a double dose of new British liberty and kindness, so that Canada might gradually become the loyal fourteenth colony of the Empire in America. But the fates were against this benevolent scheme. The French Canadians were firmly wedded to their old ways ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... despotic power in their own States for more than two generations, and justifying themselves always by divine right, the slave-holders possessed all the self-confidence, pretension, and arrogance of the old French nobility. They were a self-deluded class of men, of all classes the most difficult to deal with, and Sumner was the Mirabeau who faced them at Washington and who pricked the bubble of their Olympian pretensions by a most pitiless ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... are apt to try and better themselves. Still, that is not always the case. There is no doubt that altogether the French planters of San Domingo are much gentler in their treatment of their slaves than our people are here. Large numbers of them are of good old French families, and look on their slaves rather as children to be ruled by kindness than as beasts of burden, as there is no doubt some, not many, I hope, but certainly some of the English planters do. With San Domingo in the throes of a slave ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... romantic movement in art and literature, began to tremble on the verge of some unimagined revelation. I felt that my hand shook, and saw that the light of the candle wavered and quivered more than it need have upon the Maenads on the old French panels, making them look like the first beings slowly shaping in the formless and void darkness. When the door had closed, and the peacock curtain, glimmering like many- coloured flame, fell between us and the world, I felt, in a way I could not understand, that some singular ...
— Rosa Alchemica • W. B. Yeats
... her rights. But the man had gained such an ascendancy over her, that she did not even perceive that the connection was not good for that great object of hers, her son's position in society. In fact, he persuaded her that he was of a noble old French family, and ought to be a count. How we laughed when we heard of it! She did preserve wisdom enough to insist upon having her fortune conveyed to trustees for her son, so that Perrault could only touch the income, and not the principal; and as she ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... On a plain near the old French-Indian-English trading village, called Logstown (just below the present Economy, Pa., on the north side of the Ohio, 18 miles below Pittsburg), Wayne's army lay encamped from November, 1792, to April 30, 1793. The army was fancifully ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... I gave directions for quenelles as an adjunct to soups and for garnishing. Used in this way, they are only a revival of an old French fashion, coarsely imitated in the benighted days of Anglo-Saxon cookery by the English "force-meat balls." Lately, however, not only are quenelles a great feature in high-class cookery as additions to made dishes, but they are a most fashionable ...
— Choice Cookery • Catherine Owen
... "It was my grandmother's. She belonged to an old French family. My grandfather met her when he was in the diplomatic service. He was an Irishman, and it is from him I get ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... in too great a hurry it is wise to take the steamer—not the train—at Quebec and travel by it the eighty miles down the St. Lawrence to Malbaie, or Murray Bay, as the English call it, somewhat arrogantly rejecting the old French name used since the pioneer days of Champlain. This means an early morning start and six or seven hours—the steamers are not swift—on that great river. Only less than a mile apart are its rugged banks at Quebec ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... learn with pleasure that its example has been followed, not only by the Old French Text Society which has done such admirable work under its founders Profs. Paul Meyer and Gaston Paris, but also by the Early Russian Text Society, which was set on foot in 1877, and has since issued many excellent editions of old MS. ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... went out from regiment to regiment that afternoon, the undisciplined, ragged mobs of raw recruits began to shout for Santa Anna. Perhaps many of them had previously served under the one-legged veteran of the old French and Texan wars and at least half ...
— Ahead of the Army • W. O. Stoddard
... said she, with a strange smile, "I am told that you were drinking my health, and I have come to bring you something to drink it again. Here is a bottle of old French brandy which I have chosen for you from my father's ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... confined (as its sense of folding doors suggests that it should be) to the external entrance. The classic term cunnus for the external genitals was chiefly used by the poets; it has been the etymological source of various European names for this region, such as the old French con, which has now, however, disappeared from literature while even in popular usage it has given place to lapin and similar terms. But there is always a tendency, marked in most parts of the world, for the names of the external female ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... proceeds gravely with the important act, which is the real object of his existence. A little below the entrance to the paunch, and communicating both with it and the canal of the oesophagus, is a second receptacle, which old French naturalists, not being much acquainted with Greek, named the cap, on account of its fancied resemblance to the caps worn on the head, and which we call 'king's hood' or 'honey-comb bag.' This second ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... the French and the blacks in the old French Colony of St. Domingue was characterized by nameless atrocities committed on both sides. The last vestiges of former prosperity were swept away and the country converted into a wilderness. Toussaint ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... drink, for to-morrow we die," which, as Paul's solemn irony makes but too plain, must be the philosophy of life to those who believe that the dead rise not, which was the case with the Egyptians and the Greeks, and the Hebrews also. An old French epitaph expresses to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... to paint you just like that," murmured Lady Engleton; "you can't imagine what a perfect bit of harmony you make, with my brocade." A cousin of Lord Engleton was at the piano. He played an old French gavotte. ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... which the stars and stripes of the Union floated, looked very picturesque as we approached it. There was a ruin on one side of the American guard- house, to which we lost no time in climbing through the woods. It was the old French fort, and our hearts swelled at the thought that the French flag was the first to float over this little Gibraltar, when, some hundred and sixty years previously, our officers took possession of this magnificent country in the ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... proved that the settlers had learned something from the lessons taught in the old French War. Our people on the border knew all this and they were confident that in the struggle now upon them they would bring the count down to one for one.[1] So let the youngsters of the new day learn the truth; that is, that the backwoodsmen clung to their ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... some deer and pigs may now and then be seen, although it is too much frequented and disturbed to be at all a sure cover for them; my companion shot a very beautiful variety of the hawk on the island. After enjoying the hospitality of M. Vidie, an old French planter at Jalajala, we set off in the direction of Tanay, whence we had heard good ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... end such a story without bathos? I think it is not possible, yet I must end it. An old French priest said one day at Lourdes, to one of those with whom I travelled, that he feared that in these times the pilgrims did not pray so much as they once did, and that this was a bad sign. He spoke ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson
... eyes were very wide open, and steady, his slightly grizzled moustache was neither twisted straight up at the ends in the imperial German manner, nor straight out like a cat's whiskers, nor waxed to fine points in the old French fashion. It grew naturally and was rather short, but it hid his mouth almost completely. The man was extremely well dressed in half- mourning, wore dark grey gloves and carried a plain black stick. He spoke quietly and Malipieri thought he ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... House of Tilly presented the appearance of an old French chateau. A large hall with antique furniture occupied the center of the house, used occasionally as a court of justice when the Seigneur de Tilly exercised his judicial office for the trial of offenders, which was very rarely, thanks to ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... state."] Our verb "to govern" is an Old French word, one of the great host of French words which became a part of the English language between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, when so much French was spoken in England. The French word was gouverner, and its oldest form was the Latin gubernare, a word which the Romans borrowed from the ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... psalms and lessons together, verse by verse, and had some "good talk," as Beth called it. Then Aunt Victoria got out an old French grammar and phrase-book, a copy of "Telemaque," and a pocket-dictionary, treasured possessions which she always carried about with her, and had a kind of pride in. French had been her speciality, but these were the only French books she had, and she certainly ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... in the salons of which the adorable Josephine so well performed the honours, that the word 'Madame' came again into use. This first return towards the old French politeness was startling to some susceptible Republicans; but things were soon carried farther at the Tuileries by the introduction of 'Votre Altesse' on occasions of state ceremony, and Monseigneur ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... presume, is acquainted with that old French saying, "Dis moi qui tu hantes et je te dirai qui tu es!" which may be rendered in English: "Tell me with whom you associate and I will tell you who you are!" While this adage is almost invariably true in the case ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... me personally prompted this kind thought. Without my knowledge, but with the aid of my cousin's wife and other feminine confederates, he had selected a charming girl, some seventeen years of age, the only daughter of a rich financier, scion of an old French family, whose wife was a Spaniard. During my visit I had met her at times. She was as desirable a partner for life as any, prince or peasant, could have wanted. Educated in one of the best convents in Paris, she spoke English and Spanish equally as well as her own ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... a sharp little voice. 'You can't see me, but I can see everything I want to see. And I can see what to do. I'll crawl into my box, and you must disguise yourself as an old French governess with the best references and answer the advertisement that the wicked king put ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... years I watched her go about her daily duties with a quiet grace and serenity infinitely restful to live with, and when I was separated from her it nearly broke my heart. In connection with the love Con and I had for each other I will only add an old French quotation: ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... upon a regular organized SYSTEM: there is a fiction of attachment with us, and there is a consolation in the deceit ("the homage," according to the old mot of Rochefoucauld) "which vice pays to virtue"; for the very falsehood shows that the virtue exists somewhere. We once heard a furious old French colonel inveighing against the chastity of English demoiselles: "Figurez-vous, sir," said he (he had been a prisoner in England), "that these women come down to dinner in low dresses, and walk out alone with the men!"—and, pray ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... mechanical contrivance; also a pattern or design, particularly an heraldic design or emblem, often combined with a motto or legend. "Device" and its doublet "devise" come from the two Old French forms devis and devise of the Latin divisa, things divided, from dividere, to separate, used in the sense of to arrange, set out, apportion. "Devise," as a substantive, is now only used as a legal ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... What a sight! Come, quick, it's your turn to kick the bucket. Would you like a length of rope? Ha, ha, ha! It's enough to make one die with laughing. Didn't I say that you'd meet at the gates of hell? Quick, your sweetheart's waiting for you. Do you hesitate? Where's your old French politeness? You can't keep a lady waiting, you know. Hurry ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... ecclesiastical or Plain Song character, has here added to his luminous lecture the following precious original composition, reproduced in facsimile, in which through ingenious contrapuntal treatment he gives a mock sacred form to an old French ditty, "I Have Some Good Tobacco ...
— On the Execution of Music, and Principally of Ancient Music • Camille Saint-Saens
... were sleeping in the forward trench, and after some explanation readily lent their long-skirted coats. The officer and Robinson donned one each, and 'Enery carefully arrayed himself in a torn and discarded pair of old French baggy red breeches and the damaged French cap, and discarded his own jacket. His gray shirt might have been of any nationality, so that on the whole he made quite a passable Frenchman. While they waited for darkness he paraded the trench, shrugging ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... up, and like an Eastern queen borne by her slaves she was placed in the center of the detachment of soldiers, who resumed their march with more energy, more courage, more cheerfulness, animated by the presence of a woman, that sovereign inspiration that has stirred the old French blood to so many deeds ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... pinned at her waist and another nodding on the brim of her hat, she could not keep the excitement from sparkling in her eyes and the colour of youth was certainly flaming in her cheeks. Fanny had fitted her out with clever fingers as a black Pierrette. A Pierrette, taken from the leaves of some old French book, with her hair done in little dropping curls just faintly powdered, as if a mist of snow lay over ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... until half-a-dozen or more were bounding and leaping around the girl beside me. She caressed and quieted them with her gloved hand, speaking to them in quaint terms which I remembered to have seen in old French manuscripts. ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... the common name of romans. The name was then applied to any piece of literature composed in this vernacular instead of in the ancient classical Latin. And as the favorite kind of writing in Provencal, Old French, and Spanish was the tale of chivalrous adventure that was called par excellence, a roman, romans, or romance. The adjective romantic is much later, implying, as it does, a certain degree of critical ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... politicians. At such moments controversy subsides; the resolutions adopted by men of action, present an epitome of the ideas common to men of thought. A republic would be to revive the Revolution; the Constitution of 1791 would be government without power; the old French Constitution, if the name were applicable, had been found ineffective in 1789, equally incapable of self-maintenance or amelioration. All that it had once possessed of greatness or utility, the Parliaments, the different Orders, the various local institutions, were so evidently ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... stretching into the shining sea, dotted with a hundred white sails or black smoking steamers, and bounded by the friendly lines of the bright English shore. There are few prospects more charming than the familiar view from those old French walls—few places where young children may play, and ruminating old age repose more pleasantly than ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with steel snaps, and well stuffed. The stranger colored again, and held his hand for it, and the snap burst, and great gold pieces, English coin and very old French ones, rolled about the table, and father shut his eyes tight; and just then Faith came back and slipped into her chair. I saw her eyes sparkle as we all reached, laughing and joking, to gather them; and Mr. Gabriel—we got into the way of calling him so,—he liked it best—hurried ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... as treasures. One of these is in possession of General Meredith Reed, of Paris, France, a descendant of the signer. West returned to his home in Springfield, in 1754, to discuss the question of his future vocation. He had an inclination for military life, and volunteered as a recruit in the old French war; but military attractions vanished among the hardships involved, and in 1756, when eighteen years old, he established himself in Philadelphia as a portrait-painter, his price being "five guineas a head." Two years later he went to New York, where he passed eleven ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... aware of the troubled condition of the settlement than were these younger girls. Paul Foster told her that his Uncle Benjamin, a bold and energetic man who had served in the old French War, said that the Machias men ought to capture the British gunboat, and take the sloops, making their captains and ...
— A Little Maid of Old Maine • Alice Turner Curtis
... studious, I had occasion to discover more than once that he was a better Grecian than I, and could enlighten my ignorance." From other sources I learn that in his legal studies he delighted in the reports of law cases in Norman French, that he was fond of old French literature, and read Rabelais in the perplexing French of the original. It is mentioned in some accounts of his life that he was elected in 1811 to the New York House of Assembly by a party called the malcontents, but I have ...
— A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin - Verplanck • William Cullen Bryant
... old Count de Gauvon was going to reply, when happening to cast his eyes on me, he perceived I smiled without daring to say anything; he immediately ordered me to speak my opinion. I then said, I did not think the 't' superfluous, 'fiert' being an old French word, not derived from the noun 'ferus', proud, threatening; but from the verb 'ferit', he strikes, he wounds; the motto, therefore, did not appear to mean, some threat, but, 'Some strike who do not kill'. The whole company fixed their eyes on me, then on each ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... not to transgress certain boundaries in case an intended victim might be in a position to take his revenge. That I am not alone in seeing things this way I noted in an interview with the 79 year old French author Michel Deon in Le Figaro on the 16th of May 1998 in which Mr. Deon said: "Everywhere we are still in a nursery. A great movement attempting to turn us all into half-wits (une grande campagne de cretinisation est en route). When these ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine |
