July-August 2003 > The Browser

Chapter and Verse

Chapter & Verse

A correspondence corner for not-so-famous lost words

José Rigau would appreciate help in identifying the person (possibly French historian Charles Seignobos) who defined enlightened despotism as “All for the people, but without the people.”

 

Dinsmore Murphy seeks author, work, and date for “…led onward without will of their own by their former striving.”

 

Eugene Pattison asks if anyone knows a prior source for Louisa May Alcott’s “saying,” from Jo’s Boys, “Clay represents life; plaster, death; marble, immortality.”

 

“plains of hesitation” (May-June 2003). William Waterhouse found George W. Cecil’s text, for a 1928 advertisement for International Correspondence Schools, in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations Requested from the Congressional Research Service (GPO, 1989): "On the Plains of Hesitation bleach the bones of countless millions who, at the Door of victory, sat down to wait, and waiting—died!"

 

"Fougère" (May-June 2003). Laurence Senelick identified Eugénie Fougère, a French singer and dancer noted for eye-catching outfits, frisky movements, suggestive demeanor, and her ragtime cakewalk "Hello, Ma Baby." She performs, wrote Gerelyn Hollingsworth, at http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/varstg:@field(NUMBER(1094)).

 

“desire…” (May-June 2003). John Croke located Yeats’s source in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Table Talk: “The man’s desire is for the woman; but the woman’s desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man” (July 23, 1827).

 

Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge 02138.