This is so true that some learned
men who have never been in Switzerland have found a big ship with all
its rigging petrified on Mount St. Gothard, or at the bottom of a
precipice, one knows not where; but it is quite certain that it was
there. Therefore men were originally fish, _quod erat demonstrandum_.
To descend to a less antique antiquity, let us speak of the times when
the greater part of the barbarous nations left their countries, to go to
seek others which were hardly any better. It is true, if there be
anything true in ancient history, that there were some Gaulish brigands
who went to pillage Rome in the time of Camillus. Other Gaulish brigands
had passed, it is said, through Illyria on the way to hire their
services as murderers to other murderers, in the direction of Thrace;
they exchanged their blood for bread, and later established themselves
in Galatia. But who were these Gauls? were they Berichons and Angevins?
They were without a doubt Gauls whom the Romans called Cisalpines, and
whom we call Transalpines, famished mountain-dwellers, neighbours of the
Alps and the Apennines. The Gauls of the Seine and the Marne did not
know at that time that Rome existed, and could not take it into their
heads to pass Mount Cenis, as Hannibal did later, to go to steal the
wardrobes of Roman senators who at that time for all furniture had a
robe of poor grey stuff, ornamented with a band the colour of ox blood;
two little pummels of ivory, or rather dog's bone, on the arms of a
wooden chair; and in their kitchens a piece of rancid bacon.
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