Penguin Island, Anatole France [ready to read books TXT] 📗

together formed a town which protected itself by deep trenches and lofty walls. Later, becoming the capital of a great State, it found itself straitened within its now useless ramparts and it converted them into grass-covered walks.

It grew very rich and large beyond measure. The houses were never high enough to satisfy the people; they kept on making them still higher and built them of thirty or forty storeys, with offices, shops, banks, societies one above another; they dug cellars and tunnels ever deeper downwards. Fifteen millions of men laboured in the giant town.

Endnotes

G. Lecointe, Au Pays de manchots. Brussels, 1904. 8vo. ↩

J. B. Charcot, Journal de l’expédition antartique française. 1903⁠–⁠1905. Paris. 8vo. ↩

“Orb, poetically, a globe when speaking of the heavenly bodies. By extension any species of globular body.” —⁠Littre ↩

We have vainly sought for this phrase in Pliny’s Natural History. —⁠Editor ↩

The Penguin chronicler who relates the fact employs the expression, Species inductilis. I have endeavoured to translate it literally. ↩

The text runs

… qualem primo qui syrgere mense
Aut videt aut vidisse putat per nubila lunam.

Brother Marbodius, by a strange misunderstanding, substitutes an entirely different image for the one created by the poet. ↩

Three centuries before the epoch in which our Marbodius lived the words⁠—

Maro, vates gentilium
Da Christo testimonium

were sung in the churches on Christmas Day. ↩

Ad maronis mausoleum
Ductus, fudit super eum
Piae rorem lacrymae.

Quem te, intuit, reddidissem,
Si te vivum invenissem
Poetarum maxime!

↩

This phrase seems to indicate that, if one is to believe Macrobius, the Copa is by Virgil. ↩

There is in Marbodius’s narrative a passage very worthy of notice, viz., that in which the monk of Corrigan describes Dante Alighieri such as we picture him to ourselves today. The miniatures in a very old manuscript of the Divine Comedy, the “Codex Venetianus,” represent the poet as a little fat man clad in a short tunic, the skirts of which fall above his knees. As for Virgil, he still wears the philosophical beard, in the wood engravings of the sixteenth century.

One would not have thought either that Marbodius, or even Virgil, could have known the Etruscan tombs of Chiusi and Corneto, where, in fact, there are horrible and burlesque devils closely resembling those of Orcagna. Nevertheless, the authenticity of the Descent of Marbodius Into Hell is indisputable. M. du Clos des Lunes has firmly established it. To doubt it would be to doubt palaeography itself. ↩

Or better, Emiralty. ↩

“O Father Zeus, only save thou the sons of the Acheans from the darkness, and make clear sky and vouchsafe sight to our eyes, and then, so it be but light, slay us, since such is thy good pleasure.” ↩

Cf. J. Ernest Charles in the Censeur, May-August, 1907, p. 562, col. 2. ↩

As this ministry exercised considerable influence upon the destinies of the country and of the world, we think it well to give its composition: Minister of the Interior and Prime Minister, Paul Visire; Minister of Justice, Pierre Bouc; Foreign Affairs, Victor Crombile; Finance, Terrasson; Education, Labillette; Commerce, Posts and Telegraphs, Hippolyte Cérès; Agriculture, Aulac; Public Works, Lapersonne; War, General Débonnaire; Admiralty, Admiral Vivier des Murènes. ↩

“Poverty hast ever been familiar to Greece, but virtue has been acquired, having been accomplished by wisdom and firm laws.” —⁠Henry Cary’s translation ↩

Colophon

Penguin Island
was published in 1908 by
Anatole France.
It was translated from French in 1909 by
A. W. Evans.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Weijia Cheng,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2006 by
Aaron Cannon and David Widger
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at the
Internet Archive.

The cover page is adapted from
Dominicans in Feathers,
a painting completed in 1887 by
Henry Stacy-Marks.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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The first edition of this ebook was released on
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