France Romance Quotes

... you’ll have to fall in love at least once in your life, or Paris has failed to rub off on you.

All cats are gray in the dark. And besides, her actions have less to do with her, and everything to do with you.

Everything is debatable where the exigencies of human beings are concerned.

The only extant devil is the distorted mind of the human being...

If I were you, I would invest more in your personal garden than in utopias... these are nothing but imagined islands you'd be only animating from your personal shore...

Man is saddened because he knows not who he is, or else knows so much that he seems to be alien to all...

Change is nothing but an illusionary result of the same thing experienced yesterday attired in new garb...

To love silence you must first learn Man's distorted vocabulary. Only when you have done so will you appreciate silence.

Would you like to know what the eternal human equation is all about? The more you know yourself, the less you need to seek out others... the less you know yourself, the more you seek out others...

Like the magnolia tree, She bends with the wind, Trials and tribulation may weather her, Yet, after the storm her beauty blooms, See her standing there, like steel, With her roots forever buried, Deep in her Southern soil.

I close my eyes and listen to the ocean. I'm thinking about sailing, to England or maybe France. The way the wind would feel on my face and the sound of his voice screaming my name through his laughter. The waves would crash like applause. God, I remember when I used to be afraid of the ocean.

How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if she’d returned Richard's kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with rose-shaped buttons. Couldn’t they have discovered something larger and stranger than what they've got. It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself. Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That's who I was. This is who I am--a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port. Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at the pond's edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed. His mouth had opened to hers; (exciting and utterly familiar, she'd never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met its own. They'd kissed and walked around the pond together. It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

Cat doesn’t have to work. She’s a woman of independent means. I settled enough money on her to allow her the freedom to do anything she wished. She went to boarding school for four years, and stayed to teach for another two. Eventually she came to me and said she’d accepted a position as a governess for the Hathaway family. I believe you were in France with Win at the time. Cat went for the interview, Cam and Amelia liked her, Beatrix and Poppy clearly needed her, and no one seemed inclined to question her lack of experience.” “Of course not,” Leo said acidly. “My family would never bother with something so insignificant as job experience. I’m sure they started the interview by asking what her favorite color was.

I’m going to take Charity to France. I can look after her there. You can go on with your life here, and I won’t be here to … to bother anyone.” He muttered two quiet words. “What?” she asked in bewilderment, inching forward to hear him. “I said, try it.

It looks like a funeral parlour in here. Am I dead?

Christ said that there is no greater love than dying for others. But I say that sometimes, there is no greater love than staying alive for the sake of others. To stay alive for the sake of others, particularly if you are pure of heart, is more painful than calling it quits once and for all. See this love in this context if you want to look at it through the eyes of the heart.

Your face says so much in so little time, you let everything you're thinking bloom upon your face, and I can't think of anything else I'd rather watch than you pass through five moods in five minutes. What glorious weather.

If I’m a monster, mademoiselle, it’s because man’s cruelty has made me so.

Anticipation. In love and travel, getting there is half the fun. The lustful impatience, the passionate daydreams, the nerve-wracking waiting... lovers and travelers are all alike when they find themselves on the brink of a new adventure.

Sea and land may lie between us, but my heart is always there with you.

In French culture, the best way of buying time or getting off the hook entirely in a thorny personal situation is to claim that it’s complicated. The French did not invent love, but they did invent romance, so they’ve had more time than any other culture on earth to refine the nuances of its language.

He (Napolean) was in love with himself and France joined in. It was a romance. Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour.

France is to me the heroine in the romance of all the nations of all time. This feeling was born in me years ago when I read how her noble sons had defended America in its cradle. Today I am proud that I am one of the millions who will come to save our heroine from the clutches of the villain from across the Rhine.

I’d love to be a tabletop in Paris, where food is art and life combined in one, where people gather and talk for hours. I want lovers to meet over me. I’d want to be covered in drops of candle wax and breadcrumbs and rings from the bottom of wineglasses. I would never be lonely, and I would always serve a good purpose.

I've sequenced the questions for maximum speed of elimination,’ I explained. ‘I believe I can eliminate most women in less than forty seconds. Then you can choose the topic of discussion for the remaining time.’ ‘But then it won’t matter,’ said Frances. ‘I’ll have been eliminated.’ ‘Only as a potential partner. We may still be able to have an interesting discussion.’ ‘But I’ll have been eliminated.’ I nodded. ‘Do you smoke?’ ‘Occasionally,’ she said. I put the questionnaire away. ‘Excellent.’ I was pleased that my question sequencing was working so well. We could have wasted time talking about ice-cream flavours and make-up only to find that she smoked. Needless to say, smoking was not negotiable. ‘No more questions. What would you like to discuss?

Even in hell, there are rules.

As a rule, romance is not a place you can find on a map. But sometimes it is.

They stamped their own pattern of lovers onto the fabric of Paris.

I no longer possessed the luxury of falling in love. If something should happen to Papa, I would lose the legacy and be left in poverty.

Humans are curious creatures. What we cannot see, our logical minds will try to deny.

A man always wants his friends to be a little in love with his beloved too.

Fortune favors the bold. One doesn't win glory by hiding behind the lines.

It is a bad year for kings,” said Gondy, shaking his head; “look at England, madame.” “Yes; but fortunately we have no Oliver Cromwell in France,” replied the Queen. “Who knows?” said Gondy; “such men are like thunderbolts—one recognized them only when they have struck.

Vijaya prefers to eat alone. Rob ushered her into the room and held a chair for her, then sat across from her. "Many Indians regard eating as something that should be done in private. Considering the table manners of some of our best people, one can see their point." Patricia Frances Rowell

More than a thousand people have been imprisoned—suspected of being part of the conspiracy—including all who served the royal family. Joliette is not safe—anywhere in France. If they discover your noble identity, you will beat me to the guillotine.

Veni, vidi, vici. That was easy for Julius Caesar to say; he crossed Italy in a chariot, not on a stupid bike." - Vivia

And the One will reveal the Bow of the Southern Star and conquer the enemy with courage and fine judgment. The sight of the One is true and the enemy cannot hide. Griffon will fly

And the One will take the Sword of the Western Sun and triumph over the enemy with boldness and insight. The arm of the One is steady and heads will roll. Snow Giants will battle

Rarely understanding how much shopkeepers and waiters were charging him, he paid for everything with fifty-or hundred-franc notes and came home with sagging pockets of change.

The power of words does not lie in the stories we tell, but in our ability to connect to the hearts of those who read them.

Jane, in her letters to me, had encouraged the romance: ‘What was the point in flitting off to France if not to take a lover!

You know, I'm boring when I'm tired. And I'm always tired.

... far be it from a French man to interfere with love.

We don’t wish the day away. We embrace every second. Every new sunrise brings the possibility of possibilities.

Speaking of novels,’ I said, ‘you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust’s rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no more, impossibly rude hostesses, please let me speak, and even ruder guests, mechanical Dostoevskian rows and Tolstoian nuances of snobbishness repeated and expanded to an unsufferable length, adorable seascapes, melting avenues, no, do not interrupt me, light and shade effects rivaling those of the greatest English poets, a flora of metaphors, described—by Cocteau, I think—as “a mirage of suspended gardens,” and, I have not yet finished, an absurd, rubber-and-wire romance between a blond young blackguard (the fictitious Marcel), and an improbable jeune fille who has a pasted-on bosom, Vronski’s (and Lyovin’s) thick neck, and a cupid’s buttocks for cheeks; but—and now let me finish sweetly—we were wrong, Sybil, we were wrong in denying our little beau ténébreux the capacity of evoking “human interest”: it is there, it is there—maybe a rather eighteenth-centuryish, or even seventeenth-centuryish, brand, but it is there. Please, dip or redip, spider, into this book [offering it], you will find a pretty marker in it bought in France, I want John to keep it. Au revoir, Sybil, I must go now. I think my telephone is ringing.

CRUEL HARVEST by Fran Elizabeth Grubb is a compelling, riveting, unforgetable memoir that will keep you turning the pages. Published by Thomas Nelson and due for release August 2012. Kidnapped from an orphanage Frances is dragged across the country working in the fields. Youtubefrangrubb to see video book trailer.

As he drove away, I began to think that what kept us together was perhaps not even our romance with an imaginary France. That was just a veneer, an illusion. Rather, it was our desperate inability to lead ordinary lives with ordinary people anywhere--ordinary loves, ordinary homes, ordinary careers, watching ordinary television, eating ordinary meals, with ordinary friends--even ordinary friends we didn't have, or couldn't keep.

Me? I'm scared of everything. I'm scared of what I saw, I'm scared of what I did, of who I am, and most of all I'm scared of walking out of this room and never feeling the rest of my whole life the way I feel when I'm with you.

My interest in this started one night when I was doing stand-up in a small club in New York. I was talking about texting and I asked for a volunteer who’d met someone recently and had been texting back and forth with them. I read the back-and-forth messages of one gentleman and made jokes about how we were all dealing with some version of this nonsense. I quickly noticed that one woman seemed very puzzled. I asked her why she looked so bewildered, and she explained that this was something that just didn’t happen in France, where she was from. This kind of back-and-forth simply didn’t exist, she claimed. I asked her, “Okay, well, what would a guy in France text you, if you met him at a bar?” She said, “He would write . . . ‘Fancy a fuck?’” And I said, “Whoa. What would you write back?” She said, “I would write yes or no depending on whether I fancied one or not.” I was stunned—that kind of makes so much more sense, right?

Rousseau said that a woman’s place is the home. Many women are at home…watching their children starve. Some Assembly members voted for schools to teach girls home arts. Did any woman of the Third Estate not learn home arts as soon as she could walk? If women were educated, they’d have other ways to feed their children besides laundering and whoring.

He said nothing. Juliana peeped at him again. “You’re very anxious to get her in your power again, Vidal. But I don’t quite know why you should be, for you meant to marry her only because you had ruined her, and so were obliged to, didn’t you?” She thought that he was not going to answer, but suddenly he raised his eyes from the contemplation of the dregs of his wine. “Because I am obliged to?” he said. “I mean to marry Mary Challoner because I’m devilish sure I can’t live without her.” Juliana clapped her hands with a crow of delight. “Oh, it is famous!” she exclaimed. “I never dreamed you had fallen in love with my staid Mary! I thought you were chasing her through France just because you so hate to be crossed! But when you flew into a rage with me for saying she was too dull to be afraid of you, of course, I guessed at once! My dearest Dominic, I was never more glad of anything in my life, and it is of all things the most romantic possible! Do, do let us overtake them at once! Only conceive of their astonishment when they see us!

And the One will win the Armor of the Easter Dawn and defeat the enemy with audacity and wisdom. The body of the One is strong and ready to lead. Lammasu will pounce

Comte de la Fere, Touching Some Events Which Passed in France Toward the End of the Reign of King Louis XIII and the Commencement of the Reign

Romance is showing my new husband the places and things that mean the most to me. I can't help it if some of those places and things are in France.

Our world is changing. I don't know what's going to happen today, or tomorrow or the day after that, but whatever it is, Camille, I want to go through it with you.

Believe me, even if they paid me to do this, I wouldn't waste such a good coffee on you. Or any coffee, really.

It's a ballet. Dancing is a euphemism for everything.

I love stepping back in time

I believe, in life, there is no such thing as a bad idea. Only ideas that work and ideas that do not.

For with all that is grand, grander is the expansion of the mind.

The wind blowing through the cracks in the walls was fitting for this isolated and lonely place.

As my body recalled my soul, I began to quiver with pain and gasp for air.

often thought that you had just the kind of commonplace gifts that a host of commonplace people want to find at their service. An old servant of mine who lives in Mortimer Street

in a still, delicious room, with the summer morning sunshine

to speak to her. He was interested in his roses (which, she heard afterward, were to be sent to town to an invalid friend),

Lady Maria’s charity-knitting which she had taken up. Emily was so gratified that she found conversation easy. She did not realise that at that particular

Victorian and touchingly respectable. “I have been crying,” confessed Lady Agatha. “I was afraid so, Lady Agatha,” said Emily.

A brilliant scientist once said that the people we interact with in life play different roles depending on what splinter of reality we exist upon.

Some part of her wanted to be that woman, the woman responsible for the pain and longing in his eyes.

This tall dark stoic soldier was unaware of the charisma he possessed. Honor and loyalty were more important than happiness. Duty and pride more valuable than gold.

If faith is the belief in things not proven, and hope is the desire for fortunate outcomes, then I have seen both of these evaporate, and at the same time FULFILLED!

You're supposed to be afraid of the 'Big Bad Wolf'. Didn't they tell you?

really. But such a nice thing has happened. I have had such a delightful invitation for the first week in August.” “I’m sure you’ll enjoy it, miss,” said Jane. “It’s so hot in August.

Only when the little charade was nearly complete did Frances understand what it was all about. The spot at which Lilian had been grasping lay just above her heart. She had been drawing an imaginary stake from it.

No, not my dog. I was walking down the street, saw this golden retriever, and decided to name her Saskya and bring her home with me. It's not like I planned it or anything. It was just a spur-of-the-moment decision.

Me? I'm scared of everything. I'm scared of what I saw, I'm scared of what I did, of who I am, and most of all I'm scared of walking out of this room and never feeling the rest of my whole life the way I feel when I'm with you.

At first I thought the answer was quantum tunneling. But the key was the aether unit, which as you know exists in both time and space. All material and non-material existence is, of course, made up of this primary quantum unit.

The Americans didn’t think it against God to fight the King of England! A fight that we financed! That’s right. We paid for America’s freedom from one king while we’re slaves to another! And paying for America’s freedom bankrupted France.

... the old Berlin – last vestige of a mysterious fête – wheeled away from the gravelled road and went lurching noiselessly across country over a grass-grown track. Beyond the hedge nothing could be seen of it but the driver's cap bobbing up and down.

By the second cycle of the solstice of the warm time, the One will face the enemy. And the One will unearth the Shield of the Northern Lights and smote the enemy with daring and intelligence. The heart of the One is pious and evil will cower. Couatl will rise.

I turned my copy over to reread the back cover: always a creepy experience once you had finished a book, like getting a message from a dead person. “Nadja, originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written,” it said.

Remember these, Sons! Truth presented with tenderness enriches the soul of man and enhances humanity in the process. A Franco-Cameroonian relation based on truth and nurtured with tenderness will be to the benefit not only of Kamerun and France, but also of mankind as a whole.

I was doing stand-up in a small club in New York. I was talking about texting and I asked for a volunteer who’d met someone recently and had been texting back and forth with them. I read the back-and-forth messages of one gentleman and made jokes about how we were all dealing with some version of this nonsense. I quickly noticed that one woman seemed very puzzled. I asked her why she looked so bewildered, and she explained that this was something that just didn’t happen in France, where she was from. This kind of back-and-forth simply didn’t exist, she claimed. I asked her, “Okay, well, what would a guy in France text you, if you met him at a bar?” She said, “He would write . . . ‘Fancy a fuck?’” And I said, “Whoa. What would you write back?” She said, “I would write yes or no depending on whether I fancied one or not.” I was stunned—that kind of makes so much more sense, right?

fond of driving and the brown cob was a beauty, she felt that she was being given a treat on a level with the rest of her ladyship’s generous hospitalities. She drove well, and her straight, strong figure showed to much advantage on the high seat of the cart. Lord Walderhurst himself commented on her as he

She was a friendly creature, and lived a life so really isolated from any ordinary companionship that her simple little talks with Jane and Mrs. Cupp were a pleasure to her. The Cupps were neither gossiping nor intrusive, and she felt as if they were her friends. Once when she had been ill for a week she remembered suddenly realising that

Aether is the substance that lies beyond the universe, and beyond everything. It is an ancient term for the molecules that exist past the upper regions of space, and serve as the medium for the transmission of light waves and radiant energy. Past space and time, past all matter and antimatter, past everything is the aether. Beyond the aether is....

One might say that romance with revolution died with Solzhenitsyn. The line from Bastille to the gulag is not straight, but the connection is unmistakable. Modern totalitarianism has its roots in 1789. 'The spirit of the French Revolution has always been present in the social life of our country,' said Gorbachev during his visit to France last week. Few attempts at ingratiation have been more true or more damning.

Your account is for sixteen hundred thousand francs!” — words said by Louis Mongenod to the woman whose life was spent in the depths of the cloisters of Notre-Dame. The thought, “She must be rich!” entirely changed his way of looking at the matter. “How old is she?” he began to ask himself; and a vision of a romance in the rue Chanoinesse came to him. “She certainly has an air of nobility! Can she be concerned in some bank?” thought he.

And you dare to wear the golden spurs of a knight? You dare to call yourself a Marshal of France and carry the fleur-de-lis on your coat of arms? The meanest lackey in this hall knows more of honour and loyalty than you! Hang and burn my servants and kill me - kill too, now that you have handed your companion-in-arms Arnaud de Montsalvy, to your cousin. With my last breath, I shall call on Heaven to witness that Gilles de Rais is a traitor and a felon!

I already know a thing or two. I know it’s not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction or costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don’t know where. I only know it isn’t where women think. I look at the women in the streets of Saigon, and up-country. Some of them are very beautiful, very white, they take enormous care of their beauty here, especially up-country. They don’t do anything, just save themselves up, save themselves up for Europe, for lovers, holidays in Italy, the long six-months’ leaves every three years, when at last they’ll be able to talk about what it’s like here, this peculiar colonial existence, the marvellous domestic service provided by the houseboys, the vegetation, the dances, the white villas, big enough to get lost in, occupied by officials in distant outposts. They wait, these women. They dress just for the sake of dressing. They look at themselves. In the shade of their villas, they look at themselves for later on, they dream of romance, they already have huge wardrobes full of more dresses than they know what to do with, added together one by one like time, like the long days of waiting. Some of them go mad. Some are deserted for a young maid who keeps her mouth shut. Ditched. You can hear the word hit them, hear the sound of the blow. Some kill themselves.

From Venice to Rome, Paris to Brussels, London to Edinburgh, the Ambassadors watched, long-eared and bright-eyed. Charles of Spain, Holy Roman Emperor, fending off Islam at Prague and Lutherism in Germany and forcing recoil from the long, sticky fingers at the Vatican, cast a considering glance at heretic England. Henry, new King of France, tenderly conscious of the Emperor's power and hostility, felt his way thoughtfully toward a small cabal between himself, the Venetians and the Pope, and wondered how to induce Charles to give up Savoy, how to evict England from Boulogne, and how best to serve his close friend and dear relative Scotland without throwing England into the arms or the lap of the Empire. He observed Scotland, her baby Queen, her French and widowed Queen Mother, and her Governor Arran. He observed England, ruled by the royal uncle Somerset for the boy King Edward, aged nine. He watched with interest as the English dotingly pursued their most cherished policy: the marriage which should painlessly annex Scotland to England and end forever the long, dangerous romance between Scotland and England. Pensively, France marshalled its fleet and set about cultivating the Netherlands, whose harbours might be kind to storm-driven galleys. The Emperor, fretted by Scottish piracy and less busy than he had been, watched the northern skies narrowly. Europe, poised delicately over a brand-new board, waiting for the opening gambit.

The lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend. Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road, but her lord choked her off before I could read the book of her days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend," and the boy did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, "I am the dead, and their land." He laughed. A gull cried, "Stay. If your woman is a ghost, she doesn't know it. Neither will you." Neuromancer

You've made a conquest there, haven't you? He's taken a real shine to you'. Frences hesitated. Then, 'It's your shine,' she said. Lilian looker at her. 'What do you mean?' 'He's only taken a shine to me because I've taken a shine to you. It's your shine, Lilian.' Lilian's expression changed. She dropped her gaze, parted her lips. Her heart beat harder, jumping in the hollow at the base of her throat in that percussive way that Frances had seen once before. And when it had jumped six times, seven times, eight, nine, she looked up into Frances's eyes and said, 'Take me home, will you?

Do you know how the tradition of the bridal bouquet toss was formed?” Hugh asked. Sarah shook her head. “Are you asking me because you know, or are you asking me because you want to know?” He ignored her slight sarcasm and said, “Brides are considered to be good luck, and many centuries ago young women who wanted a piece of that luck tried quite literally to get a piece of it by tearing off bits of her gown.” “That’s barbaric!” Frances exclaimed. He smiled at her outburst. “I can only deduce that some clever soul realized that if the bride could offer a different token of her romantic success, it might prove beneficial to her health and well-being.

Depending on which flavor of academic scholarship you prefer, that age had its roots in the Renaissance or Mannerist periods in Germany, England, and Italy. It first bloomed in France in the garden of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 1780s. Others point to François-René de Chateaubriand’s château circa 1800 or Victor Hugo’s Paris apartments in the 1820s and ’30s. The time frame depends on who you ask. All agree Romanticism reached its apogee in Paris in the 1820s to 1840s before fading, according to some circa 1850 to make way for the anti-Romantic Napoléon III and the Second Empire, according to others in the 1880s when the late Romantic Decadents took over. Yet others say the period stretched until 1914—conveniently enduring through the debauched Belle Époque before expiring in time for World War I and the arrival of that other perennial of the pigeonhole specialists, modernism. There are those, however, who look beyond dates and tags and believe the Romantic spirit never died, that it overflowed, spread, fractured, came back together again like the Seine around its islands, morphed into other isms, changed its name and address dozens of times as Nadar and Balzac did and, like a phantom or vampire or other supernatural invention of the Romantic Age, it thrives today in billions of brains and hearts. The mother ship, the source, the living shrine of Romanticism remains the city of Paris.

And yet, what finally cemented our friendship from the very start was our love of France and of the French language, or, better yet, of the idea of France - because real France we no longer had much use for, nor it for us. We nursed this love like a guilty secret, because we couldn't undo it, didn't trust it, didn't even want to dignify it with the name of love. But it hovered over our lives like a fraught and tired heirloom that dated back to our respective childhoods in colonial North Africa. Perhaps it wasn't even France, or the romance of France we loved; perhaps France was the nickname we gave our desperate reach for something firm in our lives - and for both of us the past was the firmest thing we had to hold on to, and the past in both cases was written in French.

At the telegraph office, while drafting my telegram with all the excitement of a man burning with hope, I noted how much less helpless I was now than in my childhood and in relation to Mlle d’Éporcheville than to Gilberte. I need do no more than take the simple trouble to write my telegram, and the clerk had only to accept it, for the swiftest of electric communications networks to transmit it across the length and breadth of France, right down to the Mediterranean coast. Robert would bring his whole libertine past to bear on identifying the person whom I had just encountered, would place it at the disposal of the fiction that I was starting to sketch and which I need not even worry about any more, for the reply would be bound to bring my romance to a conclusion in one way or another before twenty-four hours had elapsed.

Sara, who snatched her lessons at all sorts of untimely hours from tattered and discarded books, and who had a hungry craving for everything readable, was often severe upon them in her small mind. They had books they never read; she had no books at all. If she had always had something to read, she would not have been so lonely. She liked romances and history and poetry; she would read anything. There was a sentimental housemaid in the establishment who bought the weekly penny papers, and subscribed to a circulating library, from which she got greasy volumes containing stories of marquises and dukes who invariably fell in love with orange-girls and gypsies and servant-maids, and made them the proud brides of coronets; and Sara often did parts of this maid's work so that she might earn the privilege of reading these romantic histories.

Japan is obsessed with French pastry. Yes, I know everyone who has access to French pastry is obsessed with it, but in Tokyo they've taken it another level. When a patissier becomes sufficiently famous in Paris, they open a shop in Tokyo; the department store food halls feature Pierre Herme, Henri Charpentier, and Sadaharu Aoki, who was born in Tokyo but became famous for his Japanese-influenced pastries in Paris before opening shops in his hometown. And don't forget the famous Mister Donut, which I just made up. Our favorite French pastry shop is run by a Japanese chef, Terai Norihiko, who studied in France and Belgium and opened a small shop called Aigre-Douce, in the Mejiro neighborhood. Aigre-Douce is a pastry museum, the kind of place where everything looks too beautiful to eat. On her first couple of visits, Iris chose a gooey caramel brownie concoction, but she and Laurie soon sparred over the affections of Wallace, a round two-layer cake with lime cream atop chocolate, separated by a paper-thin square chocolate wafer. "Wallace is a one-woman man," said Laurie. Iris giggled in the way eight-year-olds do at anything that smacks of romance. We never figured out why they named a cake Wallace. I blame IKEA. I've always been more interested in chocolate than fruit desserts, but for some reason, perhaps because it was summer and the fruit desserts looked so good and I was not quite myself the whole month, I gravitated toward the blackberry and raspberry items, like a cup of raspberry puree with chantilly cream and a layer of sponge cake.

And by the end of March one of them had already begun his journey. Twenty-two years old, an A.B. and LL.B. of Harvard, Francis Parkman was back from a winter trip to scenes in Pennsylvania and Ohio that would figure in his book and now he started with his cousin, Quincy Adams Shaw, for St. Louis. He was prepared to find it quite as alien to Beacon Hill as the Dakota lands beyond it, whither he was going. He was already an author (a poet and romancer), had already designed the great edifice his books were to build, and already suffered from the mysterious, composite illness that was to make his life a long torture. He hoped, in fact, that a summer on the prairies might relieve or even cure the malady that had impaired his eyes and, he feared, his heart and brain as well. He had done his best to cure it by systematic exercise, hard living in the White Mountains, and a regimen self-imposed in the code of his Puritan ancestors which would excuse no weakness. But more specifically Parkman was going west to study the Indians. He intended to write the history of the conflict between imperial Britain and imperial France, which was in great part a story of Indians. The Conspiracy of Pontiac had already taken shape in his mind; beyond it stretched out the aisles and transepts of what remains the most considerable achievement by an American historian. So he needed to see some uncorrupted Indians in their native state. It was Parkman’s fortune to witness and take part in one of the greatest national experiences, at the moment and site of its occurrence. It is our misfortune that he did not understand the smallest part of it. No other historian, not even Xenophon, has ever had so magnificent an opportunity: Parkman did not even know that it was there, and if his trip to the prairies produced one of the exuberant masterpieces of American literature, it ought instead to have produced a key work of American history. But the other half of his inheritance forbade. It was the Puritan virtues that held him to the ideal of labor and achievement and kept him faithful to his goal in spite of suffering all but unparalleled in literary history. And likewise it was the narrowness, prejudice, and mere snobbery of the Brahmins that insulated him from the coarse, crude folk who were the movement he traveled with, turned him shuddering away from them to rejoice in the ineffabilities of Beacon Hill, and denied our culture a study of the American empire at the moment of its birth. Much may rightly be regretted, therefore. But set it down also that, though the Brahmin was indifferent to Manifest Destiny, the Puritan took with him a quiet valor which has not been outmatched among literary folk or in the history of the West.