"Second Empire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... however different literary value, Arlincourt, implant the New Romance. There is the sudden, magnificent, and long-continued outburst of all the kinds in and after 1830. There is the autumn of the Second Empire, continuing and adding to the fruits and flowers of summer: and there is the gradual decadence of the last quarter of the century, with some late blossoming and second-crop fruitage—the medlars of the novel—and the dying off of the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... a perversity in having wished to do so, strange, indigestible stuff of contemplation as he might appear to be; but the perversity had had an honorable growth. Daumier's great days were in the reign of Louis-Philippe; but in the early years of the Second Empire he still plied his coarse and formidable pencil. I recalled, from a juvenile consciousness, the last failing strokes of it. They used to impress me in Paris, as a child, with their abnormal blackness as well as with their grotesque, magnifying movement, and there was something in them that ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... surrounding him was deeply impregnated with the spirit of political reformation which, though neither Elizabethan in tone nor strictly Cromwellian in atmosphere, was strongly suggestive to the lay mind of the Second Empire. The subconscious force of this abstract influence went far toward moulding the delicate shoots of his rapidly developing mentality into a brilliant knowledge of weights and measures, decimals, and the ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... downstairs before we got to his own particular quarters above. The furnishing of these rooms impressed me at the time; but I know, now, that they were heavy and clumsy when they were meant to be rich and massive, and were meretricious when they were meant to be elegant. It was all of the Second Empire, qualified by an erratic, exaggerated touch that was natively American. I am afraid I found it rather superb and was made uncomfortable—was even intimidated by it; all the more so that Raymond took it completely for granted. One room contained a big orchestrion with many pipes in ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... for the location and survey of the Iturbide Grant had been furnished by French bankers in San Francisco, and obtained by them through their correspondent in Paris. A large portion of the money had been contributed by the entourage of the Second Empire under Napoleon, as the French were desirous of getting a foothold in Mexico. The expulsion of Stone's locating and surveying party was considered an affront to France, as the survey and location were undertaken under a valid grant of land made by the Mexican government, ...
— Building a State in Apache Land • Charles D. Poston
... clear—and hateful. Before Ian had a chance to reply, Landrassy added in a low, confidential voice, saturated with sardonic suggestion, "To tell you the truth, I had ceased to reckon with women in diplomacy. I thought it was dropped with the Second Empire; but you have started a new dispensation—evidemment, evidemment. Still Mennaval goes home with your winnings. Eh bien, we have to pay ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and Empress occurred at one of those brilliant occasions at the Tuileries for which the second empire was famous. In conversing with the Emperor, he desired to know something of the operations of the American armies, and especially their marvelous methods of supply at great distances ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... Pompeii had been dreamlessly sleeping under its ashes, but in the ensuing less than half a century it had wakefully, however unwillingly, witnessed such events as the failure of secession and the abolition of slavery, the unification of Italy and Germany, the fall of the Second Empire, the liberation of Cuba, and the acquisition of the Philippines, the exile of Richard Croker, the destruction of the Boer Republic, the rise and spread of the trusts, the purification of municipal politics, the invention of wireless telegraphy, ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... reminiscences of that eventful period up to the outbreak of the Franco-German War in July 1870. It contains many curious particulars of the incidents and transactions culminating in the rupture with Prussia that brought about the downfall of his ministry and the ruin of the Second Empire. Autobiographies by men who have taken a prominent part in the momentous scenes which they describe have often the powerful effect of a dramatic representation: the actors reappear on the stage; they plead for themselves; ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... say to me about those two when he gets a chance, and he wants me to know it now," I thought. But I pretended to be absorbed in stories of the Second Empire. For we sat on and on at the table, putting off our visit to the ancient timbered houses and the monument of Jeanne d'Arc, and all the other things which called us away from those hotel windows. It seemed as ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Paris, revisiting well-known scenes. How it would surprise her to see her carriage again here in this University building in West Philadelphia. The whole museum is delightfully French in flavour; as soon as one enters one seems to step back into the curiously bizarre and tragic extravagance of the Second Empire. ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... Comedie Humaine which inspired his scheme for a series of novels dealing with the life history of a family during a particular period; as he described it himself, "the history natural and social of a family under the Second Empire." It is possible that he was also influenced by the financial success of the series of historical novels written by Erckmann-Chatrian, known as the Romans Nationaux. It was not, however, the past about which he proposed to write; no period was ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... They grumble, of course, as they do their hard stint. The French proverbially are a nation of grumblers. Napoleon took them grumbling for fifteen years to glory. He took them grumbling to Moscow, and brought them grumbling back. They grumbled under the Second Empire and into the Republic. In 1916 they all but grumbled themselves into revolution. One heard revolt whispered in a thousand places. But they did not revolt. They will not revolt. Grumbling is a mere outer mannerism. In ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... and the date is in the last years of Louis Philippe. My authority may be cavilled at; it is that of the late ingenious Mr. Van Damme, who describes Major Fraser in a book on the characters of the Second Empire. He does not seem to have heard of Saint-Germain, whom ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... France. The Human Comedy attracted the synthetic brain of Zola as he often tells us (see L'Oeuvre, where Sandoz, the novelist, Zola himself, explains to Claude his scheme of a prose epic). But he was satisfied to take one family under the Second Empire, the Rougon-Macquarts—these names were not at first in the form we now know them. A friend and admirer of Flaubert, he followed, broadly speaking, his method of proceeding and work; though an admirer of the Goncourts, he did not favour their preference ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... country, who feels as though he were living in a dream. His attitude to the whole experience is curiously ingenuous, but perfectly sane and straightforward. It is the Paris of Murger in which he lives, not the Paris of Baudelaire and the Second Empire. He takes his experiences lightly. There is no sign either of any struggle of the soul or of any very rending tempest of the heart. There is no posing, self-conscious Byronism, nor any of that morbid dallying with the idea of "sin" which ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... mother to deposit her child at the hospital without being seen by those within, ceased to be employed officially as far back as 1847; but the apparatus was long preserved intact, and I recollect seeing it in the latter years of the Second Empire, cir. 1867-70, when I was often at the artists' studios in the neighborhood. The aperture through which children were deposited in the sliding-box was close to the little door of which M. ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... the stairs he came in from the porch and met me on the landing, at the door of Miss Montmorency's best parlour— a spick-and-span apartment containing a cottage piano, some gilded furniture of the Second Empire fashion, a gaudy lithograph or two, and a carpet that had to be seen ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... twenty-seventh of March, old General Baron d'Hautrec, who had been French Ambassador in Berlin under the Second Empire, was sleeping comfortably in an easy-chair in the house which his brother had left him six months before, at 134, Avenue Henri-Martin. His lady companion continued to read aloud to him, while Soeur Auguste warmed the bed and ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... the Franco-Prussian war hastened his end. His death, which, in 1869, had been erroneously announced in all the newspapers of Europe, passed unnoticed amid the loud crash of the downfall of the second empire. ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen
... in the time of the Second Empire. To be exact, it was the night of the 18th of June, 1868; I remember the date, because, contrary to the astronomical theory of short nights at this season, this was the longest night I ever saw. It was the loveliest time of the year in ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... by lamplight: others put up with candlesticks: gas burned only in the corridors and the restaurant— asthmatic jets that, spluttering blue within globes obese, semi-opaque, and yellowish, went well with furnishings and decorations of the Second Empire to which years had lent a mellow and somehow rakish dinginess; ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... whether they were likely to fire or charge, but at last the men began one by one to sheathe their swords, and to cry "Vive la Republique!" and the Captain in command at last cried "Vive la Republique!" too, and withdrew his men, letting the crowd swarm across the bridge. So fell the Second Empire, and I wished that my grandfather had lived to see the day of the doom of the man ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... then typical of the Second Empire, and particularly famous as a supper-room. Expensive and gay, it provided, with its discreet decorations, a sumptuous scene where lorettes, actresses, respectable women, and an occasional grisette in luck, could satisfy their curiosity as ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... a defeat Loss of aristocracy in France Napoleon estranged Legitimists by the murder of the Duc d'Enghien Louis Philippe attempted to govern through the middle classes Temporary restoration of aristocratic power under the republic Overthrown by the second Empire Legitimists inferior to their ancestors Dulness of modern society and books ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... early in the days of the Second Empire, her fortune was restored to her, instead of leaving the cloister, where she had found peace, for the world, where she had found only tribulation, she took the vail and the vows that bound her to the convent forever, and devoted her means to enriching ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... compare him with Courbet, to see how far more nervous and intelligent he was, without loss to the qualities of truth and robustness. His pictures will always remain documents of the greatest importance on the society, the manners and customs of the second Empire. He did not possess the gift of psychology. His Christ aux Anges and Jesus insulte are obviously only pieces of painting without idealism. He was, like the great Dutch virtuosos, and like certain Italians, more eye than soul. Yet his Maximilian, the drawings to Poe's Raven, ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair |
