The Sun Also Rises: Chapters 8–13

At the juncture of the Rue Denfert-Rochereau with the Boulevard is a statue of two men in flowing robes.

"Here's a taxidermist's," Bill said. "Want to buy anything? Nice stuffed dog?"

"Ought not to daunt you. Never be daunted. Secret of my success. Never been daunted. Never been daunted in public."

"...Suppose they got any hard-boiled eggs here? If they had hard-boiled eggs here we wouldn't have to go all the way down to the island to eat."
"Nix," I said. "We're going to have a regular meal."

"Have you been in this pestilential city long?"

Some one had put it in the American Women's Club list as a quaint restaurant on the Paris quais as yet untouched by Americans, so we had to wait forty-five minutes for a table.

Bill had eaten at the restaurant in 1918, and right after the armistice, and Madame Lecomte made a great fuss over seeing him.

The pastureland was green, and there were fine trees, and sometimes big rivers and chateaux off in the trees.

Inside the dining-car the waiters served the fifth successive table d'hôte meal.

While we were waiting I saw a cockroach on the parquet floor that must have been at least three inches long.

There was a crowd of kids watching the car, and the square was hot, and the trees were green, and the flags hung on their staffs, and it was good to get out of the sun and under the shade of the arcade that runs all the way around the square.

We had coffee at the Iruña, sitting in comfortable wicker chairs looking out from the cool of the arcade at the big square.

He was the archivist, and all the archives of the town were in his office.

At the end of the street I saw the cathedral and walked up toward it. The first time I ever saw it I thought the façade was ugly but I liked it now.

It was dim and dark and the pillars went high up, and there were people praying, and it smelt of incense, and there were some wonderful big windows.

The bus went quite fast and made a good breeze, and as we went out along the road with the dust powdering the trees and down the hill, we had a fine view, back through the trees, of the town rising up from the bluff above the river.

The bus stopped in front of a posada and many of the passengers got down, and a lot of the baggage was unstrapped from the roof from under the big tarpaulins and lifted down.

He jerked his head at the other goats below and when I waved at him he bounded down.

"Say something ironical. Make some crack about Primo de Rivera."

"You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you..."

A sandy road led down to the ford and beyond into the woods. The path crossed the stream on another foot-log below the ford, and joined the road, and we went into the woods.

The trees were big, and the foliage was thick but it was not gloomy. There was no undergrowth, only the smooth grass, very green and fresh, and the big gray trees well spaced as though it were a park.

We unwrapped the little parcels of lunch.

Let us not pry into the holy mysteries of the hen-coop with simian fingers.

He always smiled as though there were something lewd about the secret to outsiders, but that it was something that we understood.

"He's a real aficionado."
"But he's not aficionado like you are."
Aficion means passion. An aficionado is one who is passionate about the bull-fights.

He could forgive attacks of nerves, panic, bad unexplainable actions, all sorts of lapses.

"They let the bulls out of the cages one at a time, and they have steers in the corral to receive them and keep them from fighting, and the bulls tear in at the steers and the steers run around like old maids trying to quiet them down."

"He was a very distinguished soldier," Brett said.

At the far end was the stone wall of the corrals, with apertures in the stone that were like loopholes running all along the face of each corral.

All along the old walls and ramparts people were standing.

The three lines of fortifications made three black lines of people. Above the walls there were heads in the windows of the houses.

The steer came up to him and made as though to nose at him and the bull hooked perfunctorily.

Cohn's face was sallow.

He was reserved and formal, and his face was still taut and sallow, but he cheered up finally.