"The Path to Rome"

[fiefoe]

To be honest, the book is not going very well. Belloc himself has a fine way to describe this state of affairs: 'I say a day without salt. A trudge. The air was ordinary, the colours common; men, animals, and trees indifferent. Something had stopped working.'

<Two livelier episodes:> ('The little acolyte of Rheims' story is too long to quote here, but 'the Common or Ferial Malediction' would have been a good thing to learn.)

I also asked him for coffee, and as he refused it I took him to be a heretic and went down the road making up verses against all such, and singing them loudly through the forest that now arched over me and grew deeper as I descended.
And my first verse was--
Heretics all, whoever you be,
In Tarbes or Nimes, or over the sea,
You never shall have good words from me.
Caritas non conturbat me.
If you ask me why I put a Latin line at the end, it was because I had to show that it was a song connected with the Universal Fountain and with European culture, and with all that Heresy combats.

Then I paid her with a five-franc piece, and she gave me a quantity of small change rapidly, which, as I counted it, I found to contain one Greek piece of fifty lepta very manifestly of lead. This I held up angrily before her, and (not without courage, for it is hard to deal with the darker powers) I recited to her slowly that familiar verse which the well-known Satyricus Empiricius was for ever using in his now classical attacks on the grammarians; and without any Alexandrian twaddle of accents I intoned to her--and so left her astounded to repentance or to shame.

<On religion:>
__ One's native place is the shell of one's soul, and one's church is the kernel of that nut.
__ As always happens to miraculous things, the virtue had gone out of it with the lapse of time.
__ The Faith is rich in interpretation. Distinguo. The essence of a vow is its literal meaning.
__ I begin to think this intimate religion as tragic as a great love.... Yes, certainly religion is as tragic as first love, and drags us out into the void away from our dear homes.

<<