The Good Soldier_ A Tale of Passion - Ford Madox Ford [124]
2 the town of Nauheim: Bad Nauheim is a spa on the northeastern slopes of the Taunus Mountains, twenty-four miles north of Frankfurt-am-Main, central Germany. In 1915 it was in the grand duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt and has long been noted for its salt springs, which are used to treat nerve and heart disorders. Ford visited Nauheim in 1910 with Violet Hunt.
3. the Ashburnham who accompanied… scaffold: Sir John Ashburnham (1603–71) of Sussex held the position of ‘groom of the bedchamber’ at the court of Charles I and was also treasurer and paymaster of the Royalist army during the Civil Wars (1642–51). Ford had touched on Sir John in an earlier work, Ford Madox Hueffer, The Cinque Ports: A Historical and Descriptive Record (London: William Blackwood, 1900), 36.
4. Cranford: the English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–65) published Cranford, a novel loosely based on the Cheshire town of Knutsford, in 1853. It has always been regarded as one of the quintessential portraits of English provincial life.
5. Chestnut and Walnut Streets: prime real estate in Philadelphia.
6. Farnham… William Penn: the founding father of Pennsylvania, William Penn (1644–1718), was an English Quaker. He was born at Tower Hill, London, educated in Essex, and had no connection with Farnham in Surrey.
7. Fordingbridge: a small market town in southwest Hampshire on the River Avon and the western edge of the New Forest.
8. sack of Rome by the Goths: Rome was sacked by the Visigoths under their king Alaric (c. 370–410) in August 410, an event that symbolized the fall of the Roman Empire.
9. 9 Homburg: a spa town and watering-place at the southeastern foot of the Taunus Mountains twelve miles north of Frankfurt-am-Main.
10. the Kur orchestra: the orchestra which played for the entertainment of patrons of the Kursaal (‘Cure Hall’) at Nauheim.
11. minuet de la cour: ‘minuet of the court’ (French).
12. mob may sack Versailles; the Trianon: the baroque Palace of Versailles, twelve miles west of Paris, was the principal residence of the French kings from 1678–1769. In addition to the Grand Château, there are two smaller châteaux, the Grand Trianon and the Petit Trianon. The Palace was stormed by the Paris mob on 6 October 1789 soon after the beginning of the French Revolution. The Petit Trianon was a favourite resort of Marie Antoinette (1755–93), the wife of Louis XVI (1754–93), and she only escaped with difficulty when the mob burst in to her quarters.
13. Hessian: ‘Of or pertaining to the former grand duchy, or the region or State, of Hesse in Germany’ (NSOED).
14. Taunus Wald: the Taunus Forest, extending northwards over a large area of the Taunus Mountains from Wiesbaden and Bad Homburg.
15. Swedish exercises: ‘a system of therapeutic muscular exercises’ (NSOED).
16. in saecula saeculorum: ‘for ever and ever’ (Latin). The words that conclude most prayers in the Tridentine Mass, the eucharistic liturgy used by the Roman Catholic Church from 1570 to 1964.
17. the Field: a magazine, founded in 1853, for devotees of field sports and other country pursuits.
18. Peire Vidal: the type of the reckless and scatterbrained troubadour (Provençal lyric poets who composed and sang on the theme of courtly love in the Middle Ages), Vidal’s biographer called him ‘the maddest man in all the world’.
19. Biarritz… mistral: Biarritz is a coastal town in southwest France on the Bay of Biscay. It became a fashionable resort under the patronage of the Empress Eugénie in the 1850s. Las Tours is situated in the Black Mountains of southwest France, a few miles from Carcassonne. The mistral is a cold, dry, northerly wind that is funnelled down the Rhône Valley in southern France to the Mediterranean.
20. Poughkeepsie: a small town in New York State and the location of Vassar College, a non-sectarian institution for the higher education of women, incorporated in 1861 and opened in 1865.
21. William