Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland by George Forrest Browne
page 70 of 321 (21%)
page 70 of 321 (21%)
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aqueduct to Agrippa, the son-in-law of Augustus, apparently for no
better reason than because he built a similar work in Rome. The arch of triumph[33] at the entrance to the upper town has been an inexhaustible subject of controversy for many generations of antiquaries, and up to the time of Dunod was generally attributed to Aurelian: that historian, however, believed that its sculptures represented the education of Crispus, the son of Constantine, and that the name Chrysopolis, by which Besançon was very generally known in early times, was only a corruption of Crispopolis. Earlier writers are in favour of the natural derivation of Chrysopolis, and assert that when the Senones lost their famous chief, the Brennus of Roman history, before Delphos, they built a town where Byzantium afterwards stood, and called it Bisantium and Chrysopolis, in memory of their city of those names at home. The Hôtel du Nord is a rambling old house, comfortable after French ideas of comfort, and rejoicing in an excellent cuisine; though it is true that on one occasion, at least, _haricots verts à l'Anglaise_ meant a mass of fibrous greens, swimming in a most un-English sea of artificial fat. It is a good place for studying the natural manners of the untravelled Frenchman, who there sits patiently at the table, for many minutes before dinner is served, with his napkin tucked in round his neck, and his countenance composed into a look of much resignation. The waiters are for the most part shock-headed boys, in angular-tail coats well up in the back of the neck, who frankly confess, when any order out of the common run of orders is given, that a German patois from the left bank of the Rhine is their only extensive language. One of these won my eternal gratitude by providing a clean fork at a crisis between the last savouries and the _plat doux_; for the usual practice with the waiters, when anyone neglected to secure his knife and fork for the next course, was to slip the plate from under the unwonted charge, |
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