Explore "The Pot of Basil" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The northernmost of the five gates of Parma discharged direct upon the highway that led to Colorno. At intervals from this _embouchure_ came shooting as it were the _disjecta membra_ of a disrupted State. Bodies of high functionaries, coach-loads of subsidiary officials, staffs civil and military, clerks, grooms, secretaries -- mounted, perched in dancing carrioles, or drawn heavily behind teams of ponderous Flanders mares, these and their like appeared issuing intermittingly all day from the open culvert, whence they rolled leisurely on their way towards that crystal oasis in the plains ten miles distant. The duke, in short, was changing house, and this anticipatory exodus, which looked like the decimation of his capital, represented no more after all than the adequate personnel of a great lord retiring upon a favoured sylvan retreat. So do our needs enlarge with our state, until, so far as self-help goes, we reach the condition of the paralytic.
To Don Philip a fifth and sixth _valet de chambre_ would have appeared more indispensable than a single knife and boot boy might appear to us.