Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Aspirations of Jean Servien by Anatole France, Fiction, Classics, Literary

The Aspirations of Jean Servien by Anatole France, Fiction, Classics, Literary

Allinson, Alfred
France, Anatole

Hardcover

Classic FictionHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction

ISBN10: 0809587912
ISBN13: 9780809587919
Publisher: Wildside Pr
Published: Jul 1 2004
Pages: 164
Weight: 0.88
Height: 0.50 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Jean Servien was born in a back-shop in the Rue Notre-Dame des Champs. His father was a bookbinder and worked for the Religious Houses. Jean was a little weakling child, and his mother nursed him at her breast as she sewed the books, sheet by sheet, with the curved needle of the trade. One day as she was crossing the shop, humming a song, in the words of which she found expression for the vague, splendid visions of her maternal ambition, her foot slipped on the boards, which were moist with paste. Instinctively she threw up her arm to guard the child she held clasped to her bosom, and struck her breast, thus exposed, a severe blow against the corner of the iron press. She felt no very acute pain at the time, but later on an abscess formed, which got well, but presently reopened, and a low fever supervened that confined her to her bed. There, in the long, long evenings, she would fold her little one in her one sound arm and croon over him in a hot, feverish whisper bits of her favorite ditty: The fisherman, when dawn is nigh, Peers forth to greet the kindling sky. . . . Above all, she loved the refrain that recurred at the end of each verse with only the change of a word. It was her little Jean's lullaby, who became, at the caprice of the words, turn and turn about, General, Lawyer, and ministrant at the altar in her fond hopes.

Also in

Literary Fiction

View All