To-day people complain of a surfeit: but it is not for readers to
complain; the remedy is easy; nothing forces them to read. It is not any
the more for authors to complain. Those who make the crowd must not cry
that they are being crushed. Despite the enormous quantity of books, how
few people read! and if one read profitably, one would see the
deplorable follies to which the common people offer themselves as prey
every day.
What multiplies books, despite the law of not multiplying beings
unnecessarily, is that with books one makes others; it is with several
volumes already printed that a new history of France or Spain is
fabricated, without adding anything new. All dictionaries are made with
dictionaries; almost all new geography books are repetitions of
geography books. The Summation of St. Thomas has produced two thousand
fat volumes of theology; and the same family of little worms that have
gnawed the mother, gnaw likewise the children.
_BOULEVERD OR BOULEVART_
Boulevart, fortification, rampart. Belgrade is the boulevart of the
Ottoman Empire on the Hungarian side. Who would believe that this word
originally signified only a game of bowls? The people of Paris played
bowls on the grass of the rampart; this grass was called the _verd_,
like the grass market. _On boulait sur le verd._ From there it comes
that the English, whose language is a copy of ours in almost all the
words which are not Saxon, have called the game of bowls
"bowling-green," the _verd_ (green) of the game of bowls.
Pages:
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67