“Hearing an iron rod being sawed”

Another version of the preparations for a nocturnal expedition:


Xavier de Maistre, Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room. 1825. In Voyage Around My Room. Trans. from the French by Stephen Sartarelli (New York: New Directions, 1994).

The passage from “I soon noticed” to “I should certainly have produced a masterpiece” is a deletion from a manuscript. The translator explains that he has included it

because the author himself said in a letter that he had regretted that deletion and that “this jest on the baroque names of Ossian’s heroes is no worse than the rest,” and because I myself found the passage too amusing to relegate to an end note.

Also from de Maistre
“I rarely follow a straight line” “Three steps backwards”

[Whatever Blogger’s limit is for image size, I ran up against it in trying to post this passage as one image. The orator Demosthenes practiced speaking with pebbles in his mouth.]