Goupil

“ It was, he thought, inconceivable that the Goop guy, as he privately called Mr. A. G. Goupil, should delay in answering such a communication, and when, after school was over for the day, no telegram had been delivered at East Hall, he hurried down to the telegraph office and made inquiries. The man in charge, who was not the one who had been on duty the evening before, went to a deal of trouble before informing Laurie that no message had been received. Going back, Laurie pondered. It might mean that Mr. Goupil had chosen to communicate with his lawyer instead of him, Laurie. ”

“ Bless them, therefore, and be not envious; seek an Ursula for yourselves, a young girl brought up by three old men, and by the best of all mothers—adversity.
Goupil, who does service to everybody and is justly considered the wittiest man in Nemours, has won the esteem of the little town, but he is punished in his children, who are rickety and hydrocephalous. Dionis, his predecessor, flourishes in the Chamber of Deputies, of which he is one of the finest ornaments, to the great satisfaction of the king of the French, who sees Madame Dionis at all his balls. ”

“ Gopi saith the mother, his wife, was a bad walker, even to the length of public bazaars. Her people sought her for years, but she escaped them in big towns, and ere they found her she had gained safety for this boy by palming him off on Sukya. 'Twas easy for her, being a Brahmani. Of course they made her speak somewhat ere she fulfilled her life, but not the name of the anchorite she deceived. So Gopi, knowing from the mother's babbling of this mongrel's blasphemous name, and the vow of pilgrimage for the expiation of sins, hath come hither, led by the Spirit, every year. ”

“ The arrangement suited both parties, the contractor and old Gopi, who day after day trudged home, hungry, with a bulky bundle of fodder for Surâbhi. It was a fair exchange all round; even with the old cow, who turned the fodder into milk. Not much, it is true, since the bundle was not over-large, but enough to keep Gopi's soul and body together.
And the soul grew if the body wasted. How could it be otherwise, when one was permitted to be the babe and suckling, as it were, of the Great Milk-Mother? The Great World-Mother, whose sacred work it was to nourish all things, even the little godlings? ”

“ At breakfast that morning Mary had found on her plate a picture postcard of Gobley Great Park. A stately Georgian pile, with a facade sixteen windows wide; parterres in the foreground; huge, smooth lawns receding out of the picture to right and left. Ten years more of the hard times and Gobley, with all its peers, will be deserted and decaying. Fifty years, and the countryside will know the old landmarks no more. They will have vanished as the monasteries vanished before them. ”

“ Gogol excels not only in picturing the grand aspects of the Ukraïne landscape. He has sketches filled in with adorable detail; and nothing is more curious than the contrast between the lyricism with which he celebrates the seductions of the Malo-Russian sky, and the fine, discreet, restrained tone of so many familiar impressions. The feeling for nature finds in Gogol all manner of expression: he passes in turn through every gradation. ”

“ Suddenly in the middle of a story, Gopal said—"By the way, do you know why I was so late coming home to-day? Jadu Moyra (confectioner) was telling our teacher that an Arkati (a coolie-recruiter) had come to our village. I wondered what sort of a Kati (stick) it was! I had never seen one. So off we ran to the milkmen's quarter where we heard he could be found near the indigo factory. None of the fellows could beat me in running, you know. ”

“ For all that, there may be truth in Gopi's story. There is generally the devil to pay if a Brahmani goes wrong, and she may have tried to save the boy's life by getting rid of him. If you want to know more, I'll send for Victor Emanuel. Five rupees will fetch some slight fraction of truth from the bottom of his well, and that, as a rule, is all we aliens can expect in these incidents.'
"So the old ruffian came and sat ostentatiously far from our contaminating influences in the attitude of a bronze Buddha, his mustaches curled to his eyebrows, his large lips wreathed in solemn smiles. ”

“ For his sake Gopinath stole the kshir and got the surname of "kshir-stealer." On the god's body did he lay camphor and sandal, and his love overflowed at it. Hard it is to carry camphor and sandal through a Muslim country (Bengal and Upper India) . Gopal knew that the Puri would be put in distress in doing this task. So, the gracious god, ever tender to his devotees, himself took the sandal (at Remuna) in order that the Puri's task might be done. Think of the Puri's extreme devotion! It transcends nature, it amazes the mind! He is silent, passionless, indifferent to every earthly thing. ”

“ Two features of Gogol’s life at this time are interesting as showing his development,—a tendency to asceticism, which led him to a stern self-restraint, turning all the pleasures and interests of his life to a spiritual and intellectual sphere. “My plan of my life,” he writes to his mother in 1829, “is wonderfully stern and exact. Every kopek has its place. I refuse myself even very extreme necessities, with a view of being able to keep myself in the position which I am now, so that I can satisfy my desire of seeing and feeling the beautiful (prekrásnoe) . ”

“ All the more bewildered for that vision of something undreamt of, unseen hitherto in Gopâl Das' ignorant village life--a woman fair as milk herself, smiling at him gladly, calling with quaint, strange accent: "Quick--quick! we wait, we are hungry--are we not, babies?"
There were dark toddlers round the white dress, a dark head on the white bosom, and old Gopi muttered something about the Milk-Mother, the World-Mother, as, with a brass vessel some one thrust into his hand, he squatted down beside Surâbhi. ”

“ Gobind must not be forgotten—old Gobind, who appeared in Preshbend at certain seasons, and sat down in the shade of a camphor-tree, old and gnarled as he; but a sumptuous refuge, as, in truth was Gobind in the spirit. The natives said that the austerities of Gobind were the envy of the gods; that he could hold still the blood in his veins from dusk to dawn; and make the listener understand many wonderful things about himself and the meaning of life.
The language had come to Bedient marvellously. ”

“ Gopi shook his head. "That may be; but these are to grease the slots of the canal sluice; without it, water will not run. One brain--his, that they killed with the light--opened it but one inch; as all can see if they choose. And these seven will not go far. What matter? There be plenty more where they came from."
The gossipers looked at each other. "Yea! that is so. It opens but an inch, and there are many prisoners," they said, with that curious faculty for giving heart-whole assent to the truthful foundations of a lie which makes the latter go so far in India. ”

“ Near the centre of the village rose the ancient church, the tall and graceful spire of which could be seen over the countryside for many miles. The twentieth century is a busy and a bustling age. Progress, ever on the alert, fairly leaps ahead, but it seemed to have carefully avoided Étainville in its rapid march.
Of all its inhabitants, none was better known or liked than old Père Goubain, proprietor, as was his father and grandfather before him, of the Café Rochambeau. Père Goubain was very fat—so fat, indeed, that he sat practically all day long in a big armchair. ”

“ There was not her like in the village. No! not even now that Govinda had brought home the brown cow with five teats, which had taken the prize at the Huzoor's big show. It was younger, of course, but Surâbhi would outlast the old man, and what more could he want? Then who, before these latter days, had ever heard tell of a brown cow? And as for the five teats, they might portend more milk, but were they lawful?
So long-limbed, whole-hearted, dull-headed, the villagers went doubtfully about their business scarcely less confused than old Gopi between facts and fancies, realities and unrealities ”

“ That evening the hotel clerk handed Mr. Fabian a legal looking envelope, which, upon being opened, proved to contain the passes necessary for visitors to enter and see the famous tapestries woven by the Gobelin Society.
“Ah! Now you girls will see something worth while,” remarked Mr. Fabian, holding the slips of paper above his head. “I have here the ‘open 147 sesame’ to the National Manufactory of the Gobelins which still is housed in the grounds of Louis the XVIth. There we may feast our eyes on some of the examples of weaving that has made this Society so famous.” ”

“ I believe we rarely die of cholera, or typhoid fever, without his unobtrusive assistance. And all his services are performed in person, not through any underling. That stately man who walks up the garden path morning and evening, erect as a betel-nut palm, with a tiara of graduated milk-pots on his head, and driving a snorting buffalo before him, is Gopal himself. ”

“ Mahomedan, Sikh, and Hindu mixed equally under the trees. They were old men, and when man has come to the turnstiles of Night all the creeds in the world seem to him wonderfully alike and colourless.
Gobind the one-eyed told me this. He was a holy man who lived on an island in the middle of a river and fed the fishes with little bread pellets twice a day. In flood-time, when swollen corpses stranded themselves at the foot of the island, Gobind would cause them to be piously burned, for the sake of the honour of mankind, and having regard to his own account with God hereafter. ”

“ The learned man’s hat, jerked off by M. Goefle’s efforts to free his whip, had flown off and settled down like a great black bird in the snow; the wig had held fast to the queue, the queue had refused to part with the whip-lash, and the whip, which M. Goefle could not stop to adjust, thus ending in a mass of hair heavy with powder, lost all its effect upon the sides of the spirited Loki. ”

“ Gogol was a Cossack, from Little Russia or Ukraine. For Russian readers, that is quite enough to explain the peculiar qualities of his mind and its productions, which were characterized by keen but kindly satire, with a tinge of melancholy ever running through and underneath it. He is the natural product of the land which gave him birth. This frontier country is subject to the contending influences of both north and south. ”

“ Little by little the community grew and with its growing it began to assume a general character. The beginning of the sixteenth century found whole villages settled with families, enjoying the protection of the Cossacks, who exacted certain obligations, chiefly military, so that these settlements bore a military character. The sword and the plough were friends which fraternised at every settler’s. On the other hand, Gogol tells us, the gay bachelors began to make depredations across the border to sweep down on Tatars’ wives and their daughters and to marry them. ”

“ And he sat for a good while afterwards in his chaise, wondering whether there was any one else he could visit, but it seemed there were no more officials in the town. In conversation with these potentates he very skilfully managed to flatter every one of them. To the governor he hinted, as it were casually, that one travelled in his province as in Paradise, that the roads were everywhere like velvet, and that governments which appointed wise rulers were worthy of the greatest praise. To the police-master he said something very flattering about the town police ”

“ To which the old lady replied that she had never heard the name and that there was no such landowner.
'You know Manilov, anyway?' said Tchitchikov.
'Why, who is Manilov?'
'A landowner, ma'am.'
'No, I have never heard of him, there is no such landowner here.'
'Who are the landowners here?'
'Bobrov, Svinyin, Kanapatyev, Harpakin, Trepakin, Plyeshakov.'
'Are they well-to-do people?'
'No, my good sir, not very well-to-do. One has twenty souls, another thirty; but there are none about here with as many as a hundred.'
Tchitchikov perceived that he had come quite into the wilds. ”

“ FROM the wing of the bridge, Mr. Gowan, chief officer of the Chandos, temporarily in command, watched the pilot's boat come crawling crablike across the slow surges. It was a day of haze; the horizon was lost in the gray of it, and ahead the line of the coast was a darker smear upon the distance.
"Put that ladder over!" said Mr. Gowan curtly, without moving.
He was a man of fifty, handsome and gray, with that touch of distinction that men gain whose business is the exercise of authority. ”

“ The barrenness and monotony of the Gobi produce on the traveller a sense of weariness and depression. For weeks together the same objects are constantly before his eyes: cheerless plains, covered in winter with the yellowish withered grass of the preceding year, from time to time broken by dark rocky ridges, or by smooth hills, on the summit of which the swift-footed antelope (Antilope gutturosa) occasionally casts a light shadow. With heavy measured tread the laden camels advance; tens, hundreds, of miles are passed, but the changeless desert remains sombre and unattractive as ever. ”