Meaux

“ The German army having met with no resistance whatever in its march on Paris, its advance approached the capital rapidly, and by the 14th of September the royal headquarters moved by a fine macadamized road to the Chateau Thierry, and on the 5th reached Meaux, about twenty-eight miles from Paris, where we remained four days awaiting the reconstruction of some railroad and canal bridges. The town of Meaux has a busy population of about 10,000 souls, in peaceable times principally occupied in manufacturing flour for the Paris market, having a fine waterpower for the many mills. ”

“ Ten Leagues from hence there's the City of Meaux, which is the Capital of Brie, with the Title of a Bishopric. But neither in the Church nor Town did I see any thing remarkable. The Suburbs are very fruitful, and the Neighbourhood of Paris gives the Inhabitants an Opportunity of putting off their Commodities to Advantage.
'Tis but a few Hours Journey from Meaux to Paris in the direct Road. But I went some Leagues out of the way to see M. de N——, at his Seat at C——, near Fontainbleau, and after345 having spent some days there very pleasantly, we travell'd together to Paris. ”

“ As far as eye can reach these treeless hills, their sides cut into fields by grey walls of stone, with here and there a grey stone village, and here and there a grey stone mill, present no other colours than the singular north-country brilliance of the green grass, and the blackish grey of the stone. ”

“ The productions of the works include every variety of earthenware, from the most highly decorated to the ordinary blue printed and plain white wares, stone ware, jet ware, and parian. In earthenware all the usual dinner, tea, breakfast, dessert, toilet, and other [313] services, and all other articles are made. In these the body is of the finest quality, hard and of remarkable durability, and the glaze is hard, clear, and faultless. Many of the patterns of dinner services are of great beauty and elegance. ”

“ On clear days the sunset has extraordinary magic. The entire town floats in a sea of gold. The Collegiate church changes from yellow to lemon colour, and at times to orange; and there are old walls which take on, in the evening light, the colour of bread well browned in the oven. ”

“ How willingly would one swish the harmless whitewash over more than half the colour—over all the chocolate and all the blue—with which the buildings of the world are stained! You could not wish for a better, simpler, or fresher harmony than whitewash makes with the slight sunshine and the bright grey of an English sky.
The grey-stone, grey-roofed monastery looks young in one sense—it is modern; and the friars look young in another—they are like their brothers of an earlier time. ”

“ Let them that elect grub the dirt for a “gleam,”
Our ore is the gum and our lode is the seam
That doesn’t go sneaking in mire and clay,
But grins at the sun and drinks deep of broad day.
Go grope for your gold in the bowels of mud!
We’ll cleave our fresh nuggets of resinous blood
Forced out from the heart through the fibre and
vein
Of the giants who lurk in the woodlands of
Maine. ”

“ On all sides are seen the tokens of ancient industry. As stone abounds throughout these mountains, that material was, for fences, as ready to the hand as wood, besides being much more durable. Consequently the landscape is intersected in all directions with walls of uncommon neatness and strength. ”

“ In the dining-room the walls are hung with the whole stock-in-trade of a porcelain shop, costly silver is displayed in an old farmhouse dresser, and on the table bloom aristocratic orchids, and proud silver vessels shine between rustic stone-ware plates and ewers. ”

“ Now it was the salt cellar, the plate, and the bread; then it was a Duke's Daughter—a noble soul as ever lived—with a tasting-knife, as beautiful as a rose; then another lady enters who glares at me, and gets to her knees as does the other. ”

“ In one of the four rooms of which the house consists there is a table, at which men are employed in sorting and dressing the mineral. This is necessary, because it is usually divided into two qualities, the finest of which have generally pieces of iron- ore or other impurity attached to them, which must be dressed off. ”

“ Is it not an amazing thing, for example, that human shapes, which in clay or plaster would be ignominiously excluded from a second-rate exhibition, are not only accepted, but displayed with a chuckle of elated pride, when cast in the precious metals, flanked, say by a palm-tree, borne aloft on a rock, and presented in the guise of a piece of ornamental plate? ”

“ The place of assembly where King John came out to sign this covenant was a broad and beautiful meadow on the banks of the Thames, not far from Windsor Castle. The name of the field is Runny Mead. The word mead is a contraction for meadow. ”

“ The transparent smelts on the marble-slabs, and the bright herrings, with the lump of transparent ice magnifying their eyes like a lens, are seldom looked at until the market is over, though the hampers and piles of huge maids, dropping slime from the counter, are eagerly examined and bartered for. ”

“ In the moonlight the sculptured and arcaded old buildings glow like mellow ivory around three sides of it, and it is warmed and vitalized by bustling cafés and brilliant shop windows set with tempting snares of artful jewelry and cunningly wrought glass. ”

“ At first the sunshine lies upon them in patches, like carpets of gold on a rich green floor. The sunlit area increases as the gold itself changes into green, whilst the dominant note of colour rises in the scale. ”

“ The meadows are so intense in color, they are so supremely, so saturatedly, so bottomlessly green, that you recognize you never knew green until you saw it there; and while you gaze, you feel instinctively that you have reached a promised land. ”

“ Yonder long gallery carved out of the rock's face is for miners to go to the vein to bore into the mountain's heart or wherever the vein leads them. They would tunnel through the fiery walls of Hades if pure free silver were floating on the top of the Devil's soup boiler. ”

“ Once in history two fat kings met in a field of France, between silken tents and on strips of tapestry laid upon the grass, so that this scene of glitter and shimmer was called for every age of schoolboys "The Field of the Cloth of Gold." ”

“ The fields are a kind of rich palette on which every tint of pink, russet and bronze are laid in glowing variation. The softly wavering breeze, moving among the coarse stalks, gives the view a ripple and shimmer of color like shot silk. ”

“ Many a sunny façade shows us scenes of rural life—sowing, reaping, vine-dressing, and so forth—fashioned as a calendar in stone, and many a peasant must have rejoiced as he saw himself and his occupation thus represented in effigy. ”

“ Down there in the bottom of the valley, stand those mighty many-windowed cloth mills, whose great flat, unspeakable faces, seem to be covered all over with spectacles, out of which they can look for ever without winking; there the men, women, and children, born and bred in the hills, find honest toil with which to win bread and comforts ”

“ What is known generally in England as earthenware is soft, while stone-ware, Queen’s ware, &c., are hard. The characteristics of the soft wares are a paste or body which may be scratched with a knife or file, and fusibility generally at the heat of a porcelain furnace. These soft wares may be again divided into four subdivisions: unglazed, lustrous, glazed, or enamelled. Among the three first of these subdivisions may be arranged almost all the ancient pottery of Egypt, Greece, Etruria, and Rome ”

“ Open the linen-cupboard in any farm kitchen, and you will be amazed at the wealth of its heaps of rustic creamy white.
Our weavers do not weave, our women do not spin, only hemp-thread and linen. Every man on the countryside, of the peasant class, is clad in the stout rase (thick rough cloth) , or frieze, which his brown flocks wore first of all, his own hands sheared, his wife’s clever fingers spun, and which was woven on the village loom. ”

“ Then too there are floors crowded with looms all at work, tramping like an army, and busy weaving the shirts and gowns of the entire world, and making the stranger wonder how, with the myriads of bales of cotton that are here spun, and with the myriads of yards of cotton that are here woven, there can be one bare back to be found among the whole human family. ”

“ On opening the outer door one finds oneself at once in the kitchen, the regular kitchen of the Meuse villages, with its high chimney-piece surmounted by cooking utensils, with its rows of copper saucepans, its maie for the bread, and its dresser furnished with coloured earthenware. ”

“ How true it is, that the rarity of any particular article enhances its value amazingly. In some part of the valley—I know not where, but probably in the neighbourhood of the sea—the girls were sometimes in the habit of procuring small quantities of salt, a thimble-full or so being the result of the united labours of a party of five or six employed for the greater part of the day. This precious commodity they brought to the house, enveloped in multitudinous folds of leaves ”

“ Let the clay begin. Ridding itself of all foreign substance, it gradually becomes a white earth, already very beautiful, and fit, with help of congealing fire, to be made into finest porcelain, and painted on, and be kept in kings' palaces. ”

“ Once, when a farmer under the gallery had fallen asleep and tipped back his head, with his mouth stretched open from ear to ear, some very imaginative boys in the gallery stuck a pin into a bean and lowered it down by a string to the open mouth, like a bucket into a well. ”

“ As we approached the famous Peak Hill, which is a nice little mining town, endowed with wonders of which you will presently hear, we passed several dry-blowers working. These men fossick (look) over the old workings, and by aid of a tin dish, in which they place any earth they think contains gold, and a coarse riddle with which to sift it, afterwards blowing away the fine dirt, they frequently find gold at the bottom of the dish. ”

“ In porcelain, vases, tazzas, bottles, and other articles of every conceivable form, and decorated in an endless variety of ways both in [177] painting, in alto-relievo figures and flowers, and in massive jewelling, gilding, and enamelling, are produced, and are of the most costly and elegant character. Services, both of the most sumptuous and severely simple character, are also produced in every style of art, and on every scale of cost. ”

“ In “Rustic ware,” vases, garden-seats, flower-pots, brackets, fern-stands, and an infinite variety of beautiful articles are made. This “Rustic ware” is a fine buff coloured terra-cotta, glazed with a rich brown glaze, and sometimes heightened with a green tinge, just sufficient to give it a remarkably pleasing effect. ”

“ There then existed, in the vicinity of the barriers of Paris, a sort of poor meadows, which were almost confounded with the city, where grew in summer sickly grain, and which, in autumn, after the harvest had been gathered, presented the appearance, not of having been reaped, but peeled. ”

“ I found the Palace of Green Porcelain, when we approached it about noon, deserted and falling into ruin. Only ragged vestiges of glass remained in its windows, and great sheets of the green facing had fallen away from the corroded metallic framework. ”

“ As a consequence not only in gold and metal work, but in every {xxxiii} other craft, art impulses of lofty achievement are noted. The stained glass of the time is among the most beautiful ever made. All glass-making and porcelain reached a high plane of perfection. ”

“ The articles produced here are thread, cloths, linen, and glass; and there is a manufactory of porcelain at a village about a mile distant.
It was market-day when we reached the town, and as the windows of our apartment commanded an excellent view of one of the chief streets, the scene which they opened out to us proved at once novel and interesting. Crowds of country people were congregated beneath, in all manner of grotesque costumes ”

“ The stiles that are the fashion in the stone-fence districts make quite an interesting study to strangers, for, wood being an expensive luxury, and stone being extremely cheap, everything is formed of the more enduring material. ”

“ Hence, in a completely picturesque object, as an old cottage or mill, there are introduced, by various circumstances not essential to it, but, on the whole, generally somewhat detrimental to it as cottage or mill, such elements of sublimity—complex light and shade, varied color, undulatory form, and so on—as can generally be found only in noble natural objects, woods, rocks, or mountains. ”

“ The table is always covered with elegant linen. Their plates for common use are often of that kind of manufacture which is called cream coloured, or queen's ware. They use silver on all occasions where it is common in England, nor did I ever find the spoon of horn, but in one house. ”

“ On the wall opposite to the fire were shelves, having a number of cups, basons, and cooking utensils, principally of coarse stone ware, and some few of a sort of bell-metal. The number of inhabitants in one house must be considerable, if we can form an estimate from the quantity of their dishes and vessels. ”

“ The Meads was one of those square, uncompromisingly ugly white houses which are so often to be found in rural England, and which were built at that architecturally unhappy period when old traditions had been cast aside and the modern craze for art was as yet undeveloped. ”