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March 8 - March 8, 2024
The Classics aren’t a ladder leading to quick success like a modern correspondence course!
‘By skill again, the pilot on the wine-dark sea straightens The swift ship buffeted by the winds.’
Take this Hercules—this hero! Hero, indeed! What was he but a large muscular creature of low intelligence and criminal tendencies!
Achilles, if he existed today, would be committed to a lunatic asylum.
These gods and goddesses—they seemed to have as many different aliases as a modern criminal. Indeed they seemed to be definitely criminal types. Drink, debauchery, incest, rape, loot, homicide and chicanery—enough to keep a juge d’Instruction constantly busy. No decent family life. No order, no method. Even in their crimes, no order or method!
One must have one's standards.
“These blondes, sir, they’re responsible for a lot of trouble.”
“Your psychology is excellent, your organization is first class, and you are also a very fine actress. Your performance the other day when I interviewed Lady Hoggin was irreproachable. Never think of yourself disparagingly, Miss Carnaby. You may be what is termed an untrained woman but there is nothing wrong with your brains or with your courage.”
Rumour is indeed the nine-headed Hydra of Lernea which cannot be exterminated because as fast as one head is cropped off two grow in its place.”
There is nothing so intangible, so difficult to pin down, as the source of a rumour.”
Hercule Poirot replied amiably: “Let him mount.” The girl giggled and retired. Poirot reflected kindly that her account of him to her friends would provide entertainment for many winter days to come.
The man obviously wanted to tell him something—and as obviously had lost the art of simple narration. Words had become to him a means of obscuring facts—not of revealing them. He was an adept in the art of the useful phrase—that is to say the phrase that falls soothingly on the ear and is quite empty of meaning.
Professor MacLeod had said: “Ferrier was once one of my students. He’s a sound man.” That was all, but to Hercule Poirot it represented a good deal. If MacLeod called a man sound it was a testimonial to character compared with which no popular or press enthusiasm counted at all.
(The sort of man who might fancy himself as Dictator—and we didn’t want any dictators in this country, thank you very much.)
In the classic British phrase, Ferrier would “carry on.”
“The politician wants to remain in office—as usual from the highest motives.”
I have been told, by a man who is really great, one of the greatest scientists and brains of the day, that you are—a sound man.
One hopes to present a good appearance. It is even more important,” his eyes roamed innocently over the editor’s face and somewhat slovenly attire, “when one has few natural advantages.”
What Hercules used was a river—that is to say one of the great forces of Nature. Modernize that! What is a great force of Nature? Sex, is it not?
“Mon Dieu!” he murmured. “Here indeed is the attack by the Amazons!”
Poirot said with dignity: “My remarks are, as always, apt, sound, and to the point.”
“You might start a new religion yourself,” said Japp, “with the creed: ‘There is no one so clever as Hercule Poirot, Amen, D.C. Repeat ad lib.’!”
His passion for the artistic went hand in hand with an equal passion for the historic. It was not enough for him that a thing should be beautiful—he demanded also that it should have a tradition behind it.
“So unhappy that he has forgotten what happiness means. So unhappy that he does not know he is unhappy.” The nun said softly: “Ah, a rich man. . . .”
Countess Rossakoff might not uncharitably have been described as a ruin. But she was at least a spectacular ruin. The exuberance, the full-blooded enjoyment of life was still there, and she knew, none better, how to flatter a man.
