Read "The Queen Pedauque" by Anatole France online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The marvellous in the affairs of mankind is the concatenation of effects and causes. M. Jerome Coignard was quite right in saying: "To consider that strange following of bounds and rebounds wherein our destinies clash, one is obliged to recognise that God in His perfection is in want neither of mind nor of imagination nor comic force; on the contrary He excels in imbroglio as in everything else, and if after having inspired Moses, David and the Prophets He had thought it worth while to inspire M. le Sage or the interluders of a fair, He would dictate to them the most entertaining harlequinade." And in a similar way it occurred that I became a Latinist because Friar Ange was taken by the watch and put into ecclesiastical penance for having knocked down a cutler under the arbour of the _Little Bacchus_. M. Jerome Coignard kept his promise. He gave me lessons and, finding me tractable and intelligent, he took pleasure in instructing me in the ancient languages.
In but a few years he made me a tolerably good Latinist.