The Wicker-Work Woman by Anatole France

Blown by the north wind over the hard, white ground along with a whirl of dead leaves, M. Bergeret crossed the Mall between the leafless elms and began to climb Duroc Hill. His footsteps echoed on the uneven pavements as he walked towards the louring, smoky sky which painted a barrier of violet across the horizon; to the right he left the farrier's forge and the front of a dairy decorated with a picture of two red cows, to the left stretched the long, low walls of market-gardens. He had that morning prepared his tenth and last lesson on the eighth book of the _Æneid_, and now he was mechanically turning over in his mind the points in metre and grammar which had particularly caught his notice. Guiding the rhythm of his thoughts by the beat of his footsteps, at regular intervals he repeated to himself the rhythmic words: _Patrio vocat agmina sistro_. But every now and then his keen, versatile mind flitted away to critical appreciation of a wider range.

The martial rhetoric of this eighth book annoyed him, and it seemed to him absurd that Venus should give Æneas a shield embossed with pictures of the scenes of Roman history up to the battle of Actium and the flight of Cleopatra. _Patrio vocat agmina sistro._ Having reached the cross-roads at the Bergères, which give toward Duroc Hill, he paused for a moment before the wine-coloured front of Maillard's tavern, now damp, deserted and shuttered. Here the thought occurred to him that these Romans, although he had devoted his whole life to the study of them, were, after all, but terrors of pomposity and mediocrity. As he grew older and his taste became more mellowed, there was scarcely one of them that he prized, save Catullus and Petronius. But, after all, it was his business to make the best of the lot to which fate had called him.