The Good Soldier_ A Tale of Passion - Ford Madox Ford [128]
72. the Protest… the Courageous…: actually, the document in question is not the ‘Protest’ itself, but the fifteen-point doctrinal statement drawn up at the Marburg Colloquy of 1529, and signed by, among others, the Swiss Protestant reformer Ulrich Zwingli (1484 – 1531), Martin Luther, the German Protestant reformer Martin Bucer (1491–1551), a former Dominican friar who was eventually made Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, and Philip the Magnanimous. The statement was not signed by Ludwig the Courageous because he had long been dead.
73. ‘thank’ee-marms’: a ‘thank-you-ma’am’ is an American colloquialism for ‘a hollow or ridge in a road, which causes people passing over it in a vehicle to nod the head involuntarily, as if in acknowledgement of a favour’ (NSOED).
74. Free City: since the Reformation, there had been three sovereign city states within Germany: Bremen, Hamburg and Lübeck.
75. Spa: the original health spa, in the Ardennes region of Belgium.
76. Burma: in southeast Asia, on the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, Burma had been ruled as part of British India since 1885. In 1937 it attained a measure of self-government and was separated from India. In 1948 it became an independent republic.
77. Chitral: situated about 129 miles north of Peshawar, Chitral was in Ash- burnham’s time a remote, northwestern outpost of the British Indian Empire close to the border with Afghanistan. It is now in Pakistan. In 1885, a small British force withstood siege there by local tribes.
78. Linlithgowshire: formerly a Scottish county, now part of West Lothian.
79. pipped: hurt him financially.
80. Circe — at Antibes: Circe is the goddess in Homer’s Odyssey (Book 10) who turns Odysseus’ men into swine on the island of Aeaea. Antibes is a fashionable resort on the Côte d’Azur in the Alpes-Maritimes department of France.
81. General Trochu… in i870: the French soldier Jules Louis Trochu (1815–96) was made Military Governor of Paris on 17 August 1870 during the Franco- Prussian War (1870–71). Regarded as timid and too passive, General Trochu resigned his governorship on 22 January 1871. Food shortages forced the Government of National Defence to ask for an armistice with the Prussians the following month.
82. Scarlet Woman… in Arch Street: the description of the Whore of Babylon in Revelation 17:1–18, ‘clothed in purple and scarlet’, was often applied to the Roman Catholic Church by its opponents. The largest Quaker Meeting House in the world is on Arch Street, Philadelphia.
83. ‘Requiem… aeterna erit’: ‘Eternal rest give to them, O Lord; and let perpetual light shine upon them. The just shall be in everlasting remembrance.’ From the Gradual of the Tridentine Mass. In Dowell’s source, the word ‘Justus’ follows ‘erit’.
84. a northern light: possibly a reference to the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights.
85. ‘I did not know you wanted… hardly literate: Maisie’s error, presumably, is that she uses ‘for’, rather than ‘as’ or ‘to be’.
86. Reiseverkehrsbureau: travel agency (German).
87. Schreibzimmer: writing-room (German).
88. a white lily: ‘There is a tradition that the lily sprang from the repentant tears of Eve as she went forth from Paradise. In Christian art the lily is an emblem of chastity, innocence and purity’ (Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1999).
89. Balmoral Castle: in Aberdeenshire is one of the holiday homes of the British Royal Family and its principal country residence in Scotland. The house was bought by Queen Victoria in 1848 and rebuilt for her in 1853–6 by William Smith of Aberdeen.
90. Stratford to Strathpeffer… Ledbury: Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire is world famous as the birthplace of Shakespeare; Strathpeffer, a resort town in the Highland region of Scotland, has a noted medicinal spring, and Ledbury is a market town in Herefordshire, twelve miles east of Hereford.
91. in the year 1688: suggests the English Hurlbirds may have been Catholics, as the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9