Pontoise

Benedict.

their numbers increasing, they made affiliations at Ghent, Dunkirk, and Pontoise.

In the year 1665, the Vicar General of Ghent was made the Bishop of Ypres, and he founded there a Benedictine Abbey, with the Lady Marina Beaumont as its first Lady Abbess.

In the year 1682, on the death of the first Lady Abbess, Lady Flavia Carey was chosen as the first Irish Lady Abbess, of what was intended to be at that date, and what has remained down to the present day, an Irish community.

That the Duke of York, his father, is not actually where he should be.

He's on campaign in Pontoise.

Prayers are being offered for his safety.

What does it say?

It says, "Sermon, a sermon is being preached for the safety of the Duke of York on campaign in Pontoise."

So they're worried that he's away at the very time when he was supposed to be-

The very time when he was supposed to be

he is a rotund little man with a red plump face and a butter nose upon the knob of which rests securely the bridge of a huge pair of spectacles behind the lenses a pair of childish blue eyes stare innocently but he is adept at his art his is a prosperous business and he has a motor car he was out bravely enough on one of the days when the hosts of midian were prowling round and round the country and came suddenly upon an english soldier sitting at the roadside nursing a wounded foot you'd better look out guv'nor said tommy after the good-natured little pharmacist had banged him up and hoisted him into his car there's a couple of em eulens about ere so unless you want to lose your car op it matey op it the apothecary was somewhat puzzled at the phraseology of his newly-found friend and patient but he understood the drift of it particularly as at that very moment they saw the raiders two of them riding easily through the trees down by the river scarcely a mile away so pharmacist and fighting man performed a judicious turning movement swiftly into the town told the tale there jammed a hood on to the car with a couple of men with rifles under it and hopped back again the plump little pharmacist driving slowly with sublime and splendid innocence with the afternoon sun flashing heliograph messages from the lenses of the large gold spectacles presently they came upon the uhlans who held up the automobile with their usual fierce high and mightiness and declaring that they had lost their way demanded to be shown the direction they spoke perfect french they leaned over the saddle-bows of their swift horses they produced their maps slung from their shoulders in neat leather cases with mica fronts which way had the french patrols gone surely they had been here or hereabouts yesterday the cavalry the guns the plucky pill roller without more ado suddenly dropped his steering-wheel produced an antiquated weapon from behind his seat and blew a hole big enough to put your two fists through into one of the horses there followed a fierce but harmless volley from behind the tilt and a minute later two astonished and furious uhlans were riding together as prisoners on their one surviving charger toward the peaceful capital of the department of luas they were immured in a fine old stone mansion under the shadow of the cathedral and there remained on show until an ambulance lorry arrived in the city and carried them safely southward to paris between the two large coloured bottles in the chemist's window to-day stands a relic of that exciting afternoon a houlan spiked helmet and underneath it written neatly in monsieur x s own hand a prescription label bearing the words a mort la boche as for monsieur x himself he was promised a prominent place in the great procession of october fourteenth or thereabouts you may be sure he had it that concludes chapter eight of first from the front and is also the end of section four section five of first from the front by harold ashton war correspondent of the daily news this librivox recording is in the public domain chapters nine and ten chapter nine the retreat of the epicures i have returned by force of circumstances to the gay city for a time anyway paris is bearing up most of the shops and very many of the houses are closed and shuttered the rich man has packed up his traps and with his man servants and maid servants his oxen and his asses the wife of his bosom and the children that are his has slipped away either southward whither the government has sped or to the more pacific watering-places on the south coast of england the siege of paris is bound to come so i am assured by the babbling boulevarders whom i find still squatting in their favourite niches outside cafe and brasserie like cathedral saints more perhaps like gargoyles it will not be a starvation business like the historic investment of seventy it will be speedy and astonishing and no doubt disturbing the patriotic citizens who are staying to see it through declare with all their hearts and souls that if the germans do ride in under the mask of their great guns paris may surrender herself but she will do it street by street inch by inch and die gloriously in the doing but i don't think it will really be anything like that we shall see meanwhile it is a dreadfully upsetting fact that you can't get a good dinner now at the cafe something world famous for its choice of fare many parisians notorious in the city for the gods they make of their stomachs have been staying behind simply because there is no place in the world so completely so sumptuously satisfying as the cafe something the food yesterday was well suspicious to-day some of it was really bad the panic of the gourmands began it spread across the avenue de l'opera it clamoured across the broad boulevards and it died away in the booking-hall of the gloomy station of st lazare where many fat gentlemen with handbags were bidding good-bye to the gay city for ever with first-class single tickets for london we laughed at them as they waddled off there is still some comedy left in this gigantic drama if there were not it would be unbearable so we go back to the cafe after seeing our gloomy-avised falstaffs away and proceed to drown their sorrows and float ours in foaming beakers of cafe au lait i am indeed sorry messieurs says the tall garon as he bows before us but there is no more milk to-day even the cows are fighting for us if messieurs will be content with tinned milk the comedy carries on most engagingly and the second act opens with alphonse producing from under his apron a case of m nestle which he brandishes triumphantly with one hand with the other he flourishes a sardine tin-opener ah says he jabbing furiously at the tin if this were only the neck of wilhelm before the dinner knell rings out the balcony of this particular cafe fills up with a dirty bedraggled tired-eyed lot of men who like the armies beyond the city are resting for the week-end fleet street in paris Here we all are again, back from the tumultuous torrent of war.

From Lille, St. Quentin, Amiens, Beauvais, from Betuil, and Crevecoeur, Pontoise, and Compagnes, and other places on the map which are making fresh history.

here we all are hustled and harassed left-wingers flung from pillar to post tossed from uhlan to chasseurs and back again no use for war correspondence in this war the army of the allies french and british alike but particularly british is rounding us up and heading us off with threats of imprisonment fines confiscation of kit and motor car some of us how impossible it all seems here in semi-careless paris have actually looked down flinching or not according to our kidney the cold steel of a rifle barrel others have been collared by uhlans and kicked ruthlessly out of the way we don't brag about it we have to grin and bear it not a man-jack of us but has lost most of his luggage not a man with a whole sock to his foot or a clean collar to his neck that extraordinary thing called the journalistic instinct has brought us all back to paris for a brief spell and the chance of a bath and a shave the bath costs half-a-crown the shave two francs i have them both regardless i buy a new hat a trifle too friskely parisian for my fancy a new pair of boots and then as i wander lazily across the place de la concorde i suddenly remember the countess in the train the three-handed bridge gamble and the invitation to dine at maxim's so i cross the place and make my way to that palace of delights the blinds are down the shutters clamped across the windows the house is as grimly deserted and lone as the house of ussher ah la pauvre comtesse that concludes chapter nine of first from the front the section continues with chapter x the corporal of the foreign legion He swung into the café, a fine, tall, young soldier, stiff-shouldered, erect, his dark eyes afire.

Jean, he called, beckoning the fat garçon, who was slithering along with a tray full of aperitifs.

There is some doubt as to where the heir, so earnestly desired, first saw the light.

He is frequently by later writers called Philip of Gonesse, from a royal manor house near Pontoise.

In the great chronicle of Tours, the land of Gonesse is represented as his especial patrimony.

Philip Musc, the historian of Tournai, shows that he was brought up there.

In 1220 he leased his windmills at Crépy to the commune.

Many other instances might be given.

It might be shown how ready was Philip to confirm existing charters and license them in the royal registers as when he confirmed the charter of Amiens in 1185, how gladly he gave the right of association, taking care to base it on principles the most favorable to his own position as lord, as when in 1204 he sent to the inhabitants of Niort in Poitou, whom King John had already recognized as having a commune, the établissement of Rouen as a model for their communal organization, how he made it a practice from the beginning of his reign to grant privileges to all towns which he added to his dominions as in Tournai in 1187, how carefully he considered local circumstances before he issued each particular grant, as in the case of the modifications of the charter of Mantes when its privileges were bestowed on Chaumont and on Pontoise.

But enough has been said to enable us to reach some conclusions with regard to the nature of the urban and rural constitutions which were obtained during the reign of Philip Augustus and to the character of the privileges which they involved and to estimate the personal relation of the king to the movement toward enfranchisement.

Well, I am greatly obliged to you for your successful fulfillment of your promise.

But where are we? We are out of Paris, that is clear, but where are we? At Pontoise.

Do you not see the lights of the city? Hark, there is the boom of the cannon.

At Pontoise? Let me see.

That is a station on the line to Amiens.

Let us get to the railway and proceed to England by the first train.

We thus came to my home.

My father was, I need not say, delighted to see me.