"Here is your son, is it not so? He is like you" — and laying his hand on Jean's head, who clung to his father's coat-tails in wonder at the red waist-coat and the sing-song voice, he asked if the child learned his lessons well, if he was growing up to be a clever man, if he would not soon be beginning Latin.
"That noble language," he added, "whose inimitable monuments have often made me forget my misfortunes.
"Yes, sir, I have often breakfasted on a page of Tacitus and supped on a satire of Juvenal."
«Voici votre fils, n'est-il pas vrai? Il vous ressemble.» Et posant la main sur la tête de Jean, qui, pendu à la veste de son père, s'étonnait de ce gilet rouge et de ce parler chantant, il demanda si l'enfant apprenait bien ses leçons, s'il devenait un savant, s'il n'étudierait pas bientôt la langue latine.
«Cette noble langue, ajouta-t-il, dont les monuments inimitables m'ont fait si souvent oublier mes infortunes.
«Oui, monsieur, j'ai souvent déjeuné d'une page de Tacite et soupé d'une satire de Juvénal.»
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, July 01, 2024
Breakfast and Supper
Anatole France (1844-1924), The Aspirations of Jean Servien (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1922), p. 10: