"Piquant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mocha coffee in tiny cups of egg-shell porcelain, hot, strong and fragrant, poured out in saucers of gold and silver, placed on embroidered silk doylies fringed with gold bullion, to the grand dames, who fluttered their fans with many grimaces, bending their piquant faces—be-rouged, be-powdered and be-patched—over the new ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... something resembling a waist. The chastened bows that had been squat, dowdy, spiritless, were given tweaks, flirts, bracing little pokes and dabs, till, acknowledging a master hand, they stood up, piquant, pert, smart, alert! ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Divine aliment"! He abounded in periphrases as highly coloured as sacred pictures. He talked of Rossini, quoted Racine, and spoke of "the Bois" for the Bois de Boulogne. He talked of divine love in words which were somewhat disconcerting, of present-day vices with piquant details, and of society in society language. Occasionally, expressions which were in vogue and which had only recently been invented, expressions only known among worldly people, would slip into his spiritual consultations and ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... at her piquant head, black, unconsciously outlined against the lamp, as she sat working by the table. "Just keep still ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... were found by a friend of mine, that was as a loan, which I have long since repaid, and the property in the journal is now exclusively mine. I have to thank you not only for your own brilliant contributions, but for those of the colleagues you secured. Monsieur Savarin's piquant criticisms were most valuable to us at starting. I regret to have lost his aid. But as he has set up a new journal of his own, even he has not wit enough to spare for another. A propos of our contributors, I shall ask you to present me to the fair author of The Artist's Daughter. ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... wildly. The sense of it dawned on me. She was calling Goliath. He came shuffling from his usual hiding place—the curtains. A diverting little monster. I bear him no ill will. Although I grow slightly envious of his madness. Yet his madness is a terrific flattery. It is involved and piquant and one of the things that remain for me to study cautiously. The madness of Goliath and, of course, ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... important of recent books. It is a capital study of girl-students from Boston, New York, and Chicago, exemplifying the most piquant characteristics of the respective phases of civilization and social criteria of the three cities. It is suited alike to old and young, being rich in beautiful passages of tender pathos, strong, simple and vivid, and full of ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... and to ascertain whether they are coming. Again, on the next day, a short time before the hour appointed, the invitation is repeated, to inform them that the feast is prepared and awaits them. A great number of dishes are served on small ebony tables, and dressed in the most piquant manner; there are several courses; and, in addition to various wines, cordials of a fiery nature are offered from time to time. When two persons wish to pledge one another, they leave the tables, go into the ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... lovely flushed face from the carving of a tart with wonderfully constructed towering walls. Behind a second turreted marvel of pastry, Mistress Lettice and Mr. Frederick Jones sighed and ogled with antique grace. Sir Charles Carew, fingering his cherries, told a piquant little court anecdote to Mistress Betty Carrington, and was lazily amused at the blush and veiled eyelids with which the young lady received it. Young Mr. Peyton, on her other side, ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... marauders, had seen many and diverse love affairs. On the shady bypaths he had followed, edging along the rim of the law, he had met all sorts of couples, men and women incomprehensibly attracted, ill-assorted, mysterious, picturesque. This seemed to him one of the most piquant combinations he had ever encountered—a bandit and a comic opera singer. It amused him vastly and he crooned over the paper, grinning in the dusk. The fellow had evidently marked the item and written his congratulations, intending to send it to her, ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... had met Lady Eileen Meredith, daughter of the Duke of Burghley. Like others, he had fallen a victim to her grey eyes. The piquant beauty, the supple grace, the intangible charm of the girl had aroused his desire. A man who always achieved his ends, he set himself to woo and win her with fierce impetuosity. He had won. Now he was spending his last night of ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... a singularly new, piquant, and exciting sensation to stare in person, and as in the present, at bygone actualities, and be able to foretell the past and remember ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... His pleasant disposition, his skill, and his integrity are as well known as his famous snuff-box, described by Mr. Dibdin as having a not less imposing air than the remarkable periwig of Sir Fopling of old, which, according to the piquant note of Dr. Warburton, usually made its entrance upon the stage in a sedan chair, brought in by two chairmen, with infinite satisfaction to the audience. When a high price book is balancing between L15 and L20, it is a fearful sign of its reaching an additional ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... Cambridge. He was, I remember, extremely well connected, and even when we were all little boys together we knew that his mother's brother was Lord Holdhurst, the great conservative politician. This gaudy relationship did him little good at school. On the contrary, it seemed rather a piquant thing to us to chevy him about the playground and hit him over the shins with a wicket. But it was another thing when he came out into the world. I heard vaguely that his abilities and the influences which he commanded had won him a good position at the Foreign ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... along the sidewalk whispering to each other, or the three Bohemian Marys in their long plush coats and caps, comporting themselves with a dignity that only made their eventful histories the more piquant. If he went to the hotel to see a traveling man on business, there was Tiny, arching her shoulders at him like a kitten. If he went into the laundry to get his collars, there were the four Danish girls, smiling up from their ironing-boards, with their white throats ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... though in the crowd of beauty that has been so profusely lavished on the youthful in this country, she would not have been at all remarked in a large assembly of young American girls. Her face was pleasing nevertheless; and there was a piquant contrast between the raven blackness of her hair the deep blue of her eyes, and the dazzling whiteness of her skin. Her colour, too, was high, and changeful with her emotions. As for teeth, she had a set that one might have travelled weeks to meet with their ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... thoughts were on this fantastic journey, he never knew, nor just what secret nerve in her was satisfied by it. By leaning sideways, he could see that her eyes were fixed on the grey-white stretch to be travelled: her warm breath came back to him; and the coil of her hair, with its piquant odour, was so close that, by bending, he could have touched it with his lips. But he was still in too detached a mood to be happy; he felt, throughout, as if all this were happening to some ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... coat and top hat, he looked very handsome, even with his crippled arm. And quite like a bridegroom! For a moment he made her wish she had taken Marie's advice about her hair. She was in a brown traveling suit with a piquant hat that made her look quite Parisienne—though her low tan shoes, tied with big silk bows at her trim ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... on the Accounts another speech,(163) which is much admired, in which there was du sel, et du piquant, a pleines mains. Charles en fut enchants, and I hear that the satire of it was pointed strongly against Lord N(orth). It wanted no other recommendation to the party who dines here to-day. Sir J. Irwin will be soon with you. I supped ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... tang of health-giving cranberries gives zest to the appetite, and a piquant flavor ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... Probably Vermont would have transformed the famous advice of Uriah Heep to "Always be obliging." Certainly, no pleasanter company could be found, whether for man or woman; whatever the hour, however mixed the company, Jasper Vermont had always a smile, a jest, or a new and piquant scandal. In the smoking-room he would rival Mortimer Shelton in apparently good-natured cynicism. In a duchess's boudoir he would enliven the afternoon tea hour with the neatest of epigrams and the spiciest slander of her Grace's dearest friend. Nothing came amiss to him; as ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... the historic Alamo Plaza, in the heart of the city, had been a carnival, a saturnalia that was renowned throughout the land. Then the caterers numbered hundreds; the patrons thousands. Drawn by the coquettish senoritas, the music of the weird Spanish minstrels, and the strange piquant Mexican dishes served at a hundred competing tables, crowds thronged the Alamo Plaza all night. Travellers, rancheros, family parties, gay gasconading rounders, sightseers and prowlers of polyglot, owlish San Antone mingled there at the centre of the city's ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... the tone heterogeneous, it is merely a judicious mixture, in equal proportions, of all the other tones in the world, and is consequently made up of every thing deep, great, odd, piquant, pertinent, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... flow of her small talk. Her love of gossip amounted almost to a passion, and nothing came amiss to her; she liked to know everything about everybody, and in the main I think her interest was a kindly one, though she found that a little bit of scandal, every now and then, added a piquant flavour to the homely fare provided by the ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... from the main road and people's eyes—that she had not walked. Gypsy could row and skate and swim, and play ball and make kites, and coast and race, and drive, and chop wood. Altogether Gypsy seemed like a very pretty, piquant mistake; as if a mischievous boy had somehow stolen the plaid dresses, red cheeks, quick wit, and little indescribable graces of a girl, and was playing off a continual joke on the world. Old Mrs. Surly, who lived opposite, and wore green spectacles, ...
— Gypsy Breynton • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... emboldened by the childish appeal of the long brown distinguishing braid down her back, or whether he suddenly found something peculiarly provocative in the reddish brown eyes between their thickset hedge of lashes, and with the trim figure and piquant pose, and was seized with that hysteric desperation which sometimes attacks timidity itself, I cannot say! Enough that he suddenly put his arm around her waist and his lips to her soft satin cheek, peppered and ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... Grey One tossed up the covering from the easel. He saw a girl in red, natty figure, piquant face. It was not finished. She was to stand at the head of a saddle-horse, as yet embryonic. She stepped hastily to a little desk and poked at a formidable pile ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... now become of the diary it is impossible to say, but judging by the excerpts used in the anonymous letters, it must have constituted a particularly piquant volume or series of volumes! Thus there was one remark about the emperor which ridiculed "his intolerable swagger." There were also some comical references to Princess Victoria of Prussia, who was jilted by ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... success for her, she had placed three patches. She had washed her hair with some lye, which changed its hue for a few days from a gold color to a duller shade. Madame Steinbock's was almost red, and she would be in every point unlike her. This new effect gave her a piquant and strange appearance, which puzzled her followers so much, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... sad. He noted that her hair curled over her brow in a way he had not pictured in the lady of his dreams; this was so much lovelier. He did not care for tall girls; he had not cared for them for almost half an hour. It was so much more beautiful to be dainty and small and piquant. He had no notion that he was sighing in a way that would have put a furnace to shame, but he turned his eyes from her because he feared that if he looked longer he might blurt out some speech about ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... the translator of Plato, Thucydides, and Aristotle. Though he was not the kind of man to inflate himself with any idea that he was "Socrates redivivus" I have no doubt that he found the worldlywise malice of Lord Westbury as piquant as the Greek philosopher did ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... by all the beaux esprits of the time. Amongst others, “M. Pascal, who had then acquired so much reputation, and another savant, were continually with this belle savante.” It is difficult to know what to make of this vague if piquant anecdote. Some of Pascal’s more religious admirers have even been scandalised by it, and have tried to show that it could not refer to the author of the ‘Pensées.’ M. Cousin and other parties have emphasised it too much. ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... window looking listlessly out. If she heard Grace's light knock she paid no attention to it. It was not until Grace said rather diffidently, "We heard you were ill and thought we'd come in to see you," that the girl at the window turned toward Grace. Her piquant little face was drawn and pale, and her eyes looked suspiciously red. She eyed Grace almost sulkily, then said slowly, "It was kind of you to come, but I shall be all right to-morrow." Under Grace's serious glance her eyes fell, then, to her visitors' ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... day upon the autumnal awakening of brilliant and horse-loving Paris in the avenues of the Bois. Annette was amused in listening to him, acquired some taste for those topics of the days that he recounted to her, fresh and piquant as they were. An intimacy of youth sprang up between them, a pleasant companionship which a common and passionate love for horses naturally fostered. When he had gone the Countess and the Count would artfully praise him, ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... Not the least piquant of them would be the criticisms of a Breton captain, Kersaint, on the bellicose speech which he launched at the Convention on 1st January 1793. Admitting that Pitt really wanted peace, while Fox only desired to abase his rival, he ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... rapidly in German to Colonel Grau, who had been uneasy during the conversation in English, because he failed to understand it. His expression of piquant surprise was intensified as he ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... her manners and style must have been picked up in the best society. She sat there under the shaded lights and behind the bank of flowers like as to the manner born, and her accent was only sufficiently American to render her conversation piquant. ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... of the grand monarque, when old French literature was so much despised, is certainly a curiosity. The Rabelais of Madame de Pompadour (in morocco) seems comparatively cheap at 60 pounds. There is something piquant in the idea of inheriting from that famous beauty the work of the colossal ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... but rather a piquant titillation of my bitter humour, when I disentangled from Wetter's confident and eloquent description of the Ideal Ambassador a tolerably accurate, if somewhat partial, portrait of himself. I was rather surprised at his desire for the position. Subsequently I learned that pecuniary embarrassments ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... were called the principles of agriculture, he found them involved in obscurity; he went to the book of Nature for instruction, and commenced, like Descartes, with doubting everything. He condemns the Roman husbandry as fettered by superstitions, and gives a piquant sneer at the absurd rhetoric and verbosity of Varro.[G] Nor is he any more tolerant of Scotch superstitions. He declares against wasteful and careless farming in a way that reminds us of our good friend Judge ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... and I have a battle royal over it. I verily believe that Aunt would like me to dress in the fashions in vogue in her youth. There is always a certain flavour of old-fashionedness about my gowns and hats. Connie used to say that it was delicious and gave me a piquant uniqueness—a certain unlikeness to other people that possessed a positive charm. That is only Connie's ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... slender. Her face was piquant but not intellectual, and scarcely beautiful. It pleased rather by its life and motion and oddity than by its beauty. She looked at her companion in a peculiar way—trustfully, almost reverently—and yet with a touch of coquetry which seemed ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... to most of us would be unperceived or meaningless he reads as if it were an open book. Best of all, he has the power of imparting his enjoyment, and what he writes is full of outdoor fragrance, racy, piquant, and individual. His snap and vivacity are wholly unartificial. They are a part of the man—a man full of imagination and sensitiveness, a philosopher, a humorist, a hater of shams and pretension. The tenor of his life ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... Baptists, Episcopalians, and Methodists hold services on alternate Sundays in the court-house. All the planters and many others near the lake shore keep a boat at their landing, and a raft for crossing vehicles and horses. It seemed very piquant at first, this taking our boat to go visiting, and on moonlight nights it was charming. The woods around are lovelier than those in Louisiana, though one misses the moaning of the pines. There is fine fishing and hunting, but these cotton estates are not so pleasant ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... Not a pretty, piquant face like Gertrude's, quickly smiling or quickly clouded, but a cheerful, reliable face with a pretty, good-tempered smile and kind, gentle eyes; a face that little children smiled back at, and which invalids loved to see bending over them. ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... she had returned merely to restore the jewels and the cigarette case; and he would believe her, for he was generous.... She could, but—she could not. Not now. Yesterday, the excitement had buoyed her; she had gained a piquant enjoyment from befooling him, playing her part of the amateur crackswoman in this little comedy of the stolen jewels. But therein lay the difference: yesterday it had been comedy, but to-day—ah! to-day she could no longer laugh. ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... was. Her profuse hair, of dark, chestnut brown, hung in thick curls to her waist; her complexion was dark, cheeks round and red as apples, her forehead low, her nose perfection, her teeth like pearls, her eyes small, bright and hazel. Very pretty, very sparkling, very piquant, and ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... anything be finer than that? An ordinary mystery is not, of course, as good as a scandal, but when it relates to dark and dreadful practices— to the exercise of unearthly powers—could anything be more piquant? It explains, too, the singular influence the man has upon me. It is the undefinable in his art—black art. Seriously, dear, I quite tremble when he looks me full in the eyes with those unfathomable ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... know the lady again. He puts down her age at about twenty-six, describing her—to use his own piquant expression—as "a bit of all right." She had brown eyes and a taking way ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... that she had taught her husband, a very young man, thirty years under her own age—to play the lover's part, which he did badly enough. Malicious tongues were naturally very busy, and the more so, as many of the recited passages gave room for the most piquant applications." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... it remained a long time without being published. In 1788, however, an edition appeared, but so mutilated and disfigured, either through the prudence of the editor or the scissors of the censor, that the more piquant traits of the correspondence had entirely disappeared. The bold, original expressions of the German were modified and enfeebled by the timid translator, and all the names of individuals and families were suppressed, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... archaically homely background the beauty of the young girl appeared in most striking contrast. Her curls peeped out from under the white Dutch cap she wore. Her eyes sparkled with indignant protest, her face was piquant and was just then flushed, and her nose had the least bit of a natural uptilt, giving her the air of a young woman who had a will of her own ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... and piquant episode that modern war can ever show came next. The Defender, having sunk an enemy, lowered a whaler to pick up its swimming survivors. Before the whaler got back, an enemy's cruiser came up and chased the Defender, which thus had to abandon ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... Observe the piquant effect, in the final phrase, produced by the elision of a measure; there being in the whole song 31 measures instead of the ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... was a tall tree that stood in solitary splendor on a mountain top. The fame of the pine lured a young engineer through Kentucky to catch the trail, and when he finally climbed to its shelter he found not only the pine but the foot-prints of a girl. And the girl proved to be lovely, piquant, and the trail of these girlish foot-prints led the young engineer a madder chase than "the trail ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... intimidated and bleeding, shrank back into itself. Josephine became taciturn, embarrassed, and mute, in her husband's presence; she preferred being silent, rather than by her conversation, which might not appear intellectual and piquant enough for the viscount, to ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... that flashed through Bansemer's brain was the realisation that she was far more beautiful than he had expected her to be. There was a truly aristocratic loveliness in the rather piquant face, and she undeniably possessed "manner." Maturity had improved her vastly, he confessed with strange exultation; age had been kinder than youth. He forgot the play, seldom taking his eyes from the back which again had been turned to him. Calculating, he reached ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... without being exactly an incurable philanderer, was nevertheless insufficiently commonplace to contemplate marriage, in the Pauline sense, as a necessity. He was much more disposed, at least for the present, to regard it merely as a piquant possibility, towards which his very attitude of indecision lent him an extra weapon of power in his ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... from the throbbing sunshine into the green-black shadows of a tree, and seated himself with a boyish lightness in piquant contrast with his gray-haired dignity—a lightness that meant athletic years. Eleanor bent down the branch of a great bush that faced him and sat on it as if a bird had poised there. She smiled as their eyes met, and ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... character (of D.V.W.) nothing more will be said. What, then, have I to fear? My mother s'est bien rangee. She leads a life of the most respectable. If they challenge her, she can counter with some of the most piquant scandals of the last ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... a Merry Andrew, took my hand, and said, I had the most piquant wit he had met with that night: "And, friend," said he, "let us ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... a foreign country where people were brought up with the manners of poodles. Our pity for foreigners was nourished by the manner of the Count's dress, which would have been a commonplace on a boulevard, but astounded Muirtown on its first appearance, and always lent an element of piquant interest to our streets. His perfectly brushed hat, broadish in the brim and curled at the sides, which he wore at the faintest possible angle, down to his patent leather boots, which it was supposed he obtained in Paris, and wore ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... getting work, at first giving sixpenny lessons and afterwards getting paragraphs on street incidents into the newspapers under the signature of "Eye-Witness." These paragraphs, it was said, were so interesting and piquant that they were soon taken. This alone showed the young man's practical and intellectual superiority over the masses of needy and unfortunate students of both sexes who hang about the offices of the newspapers and journals, ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... her portfolio, and showed two or three water-coloured drawings of the graceful little head and piquant features. Edgar criticised, and promised a lesson; and the sitter, nothing loth, though rather coy, was caught. She blushed and smiled, and took exception at little personalities, and laughed her forgiveness, going through ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... spherical, slightly elongated or tapering, nearly of the size and form of the Gray Turnip-rooted; skin dull black, rough, and wrinkled; flesh white, solid, crisp, and piquant; leaves of the size of those of the Gray Turnip-rooted. Season intermediate between that of the last named and ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... The two lateral white quills in its tail seem strictly in character. These quills spring from a dash of scorn and defiance in the bird's make-up. By the aid of these, it can almost emit a flash as it struts about the fields and jerks out its sharp notes. They give a rayed, a definite and piquant expression to its movements. This bird is not properly a lark, but a starling, say the ornithologists, though it is lark-like in its habits, being a walker and entirely a ground-bird. Its color also allies ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... friends, being seated in the most honourable station at the board, were ceremoniously attended to by the Chevalier, who did the honours of his table to them and to the other guests, and seasoned the whole with his agreeable conversation. The dinner was really excellent, in that piquant style of cookery which the French had already introduced, and which the home-bred young men of England, when they aspired to the rank of connoisseurs and persons of taste, were under the necessity of admiring. The wine was also of the first quality, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... field was yet decidedly doubtful when 'Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard' appeared in 1881. It at once established his reputation; 'Sylvestre Bonnard', as 'Le Lys Rouge' later, was crowned by the French Academy. These novels are replete with fine irony, benevolent scepticism and piquant turns, and will survive the greater part of romances now read in France. The list of Anatole France's works in fiction is a large one. The titles of nearly all of them, arranged in chronological order, are as follows: 'Les Desirs de Jean Seyvien (1882); Abeille (1883); ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... to meet the varying slants and lurches of the vessel. She spoke the English language confidently and well. Her accent, which was scarcely noticeable, betrayed the fact that she had mastered French long before attempting English. There was a piquant boldness in the occasional misplacing of words and in the haphazard construction of sentences. She ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... of life be without them? It was for an adventure that I first began to pay my attentions to her. I've chased a good deal of game in my time, but there's no chase like that of a pretty woman. There was the piquant difficulty of it also, for, as she was the companion of Lady Emily Rood, it was almost impossible to see her alone. On the top of all the other obstacles which attracted me, I learned from her own lips very early in the proceedings ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... announced. "The little green tables have such a violent attraction for him, and he's just evolved a new and infallible system which he wants to try. Funnily enough, I had a craving for home. I can't think why—just in the middle of the season there! But I'm glad, now, that I came." Her small, piquant face shadowed suddenly. "I've bad news," she began abruptly, after a pause. Penelope ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... Touranian, and joyfully to chronicle the merry doings of the famous people of this sweet and productive land, more fertile in cuckolds, dandies and witty wags than any other, and which has furnished a good share of men of renown in France, as witness the departed Courier of piquant memory; Verville, author of Moyen de Parvenir, and others equally well known, among whom we will specially mention the Sieur Descartes, because he was a melancholy genius, and devoted himself more to brown studies than to drinks and ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... that Casanova quarrelled with Voltaire, because Voltaire had told him frankly that his translation of L'Ecossaise was a bad translation. It is piquant to read another note written in ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... arrival, so that her brother and I were for an hour or two this evening thrown together. I left him at liberty to separate himself from me if he pleased, but he did not use the opportunity. A kind of comradeship, rendered piquant by our peculiar relations, had begun to spring up between us. He seemed to take an odd pleasure in my company, more than once rallied me on my post of jailor, would ask humorously if he might do this or that; and once even inquired what I should do ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... not disguise from himself, however, that there were a number of drawbacks in the way of his becoming established as the heir of the Dudley mansion-house and fortune. In the first place, Cousin Elsie was, unquestionably, very piquant, very handsome, game as a hawk, and hard to please, which made her worth trying for. But then there was something about Cousin Elsie,—(the small, white scars began stinging, as he said this to ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... in my face. "Not at all, I sit here as safe as if I were at White's, and a devilish deal better satisfied. Situation piquant! Company of the best! Gad's life, I ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... down toward the woods," she suggested, with a smile which lay strangely on her piquant features. "It will look better than standing like posts on ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... to age, and both more ignorant of the day's doings than is consistent with even their social responsibilities, in compensation the women of this circle are as pretty and amiable as it is possible to be in a fallen world. The foreigner never forgets those piquant, mutines faces of Andalusia and those dreamy eyes of Malaga,—the black masses of Moorish hair and the blond glory of those graceful heads that trace their descent from Gothic demigods. They were not very learned nor very witty, ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... interests of society, sacrifice somewhat of that "valuable space" which should have been devoted to the bulletin of the health, or the history of the travels, of the "gallant officer" who last deliberately shot his friend in a duel; or the piquant details of the last crim. con., with the extraordinary disclosures expected to be made by the "noble defendant." Society has no sympathy with vices to which it has no temptation; it might have done foolish ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... are a few in the boxes as well as in the galleries who discern the realities and who hear the true appeal, even through those grotesque melodramas. But with the overwhelming majority it is quite different. For them it is entertainment, and as such it is devastating. It is quite true that many a piquant comic opera shows more actual frivolity, and no one will underestimate the shady influence of such voluptuous vulgarities in their multicoloured stage setting. Yet from a psychological point of view the effect of the pathetic treatment is far more dangerous ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... she approacht him a second time with repeated Cries, saying, that her Children must perish for want of Food; but finding the Captain inexorable and altogether unmov'd with her Complaints, and her Husband not restor'd, through a piquant necessity wedded to despair; she cut off the Heads of her Children with sharp Stones, and so dispatcht them ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas
... had already been at the table for several hours, and were now in that comfortable and agreeable mood which epicures feel when they have found the numerous courses palatable and piquant, the Hock sufficiently cold, the Burgundy sufficiently warm, the oysters fresh, and the truffles well-flavored. They had got as far as the roast; the pheasants, with their delicate sauce, filled the room with an appetizing odor, and the corks of the champagne-bottles gave loud reports, ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... of a pious imagination in the biographer or his subject, we arrive at the following historical basis: Rahere was a man of humble origin, who had found his way to the Court of Henry I, where he won favour by his agreeable manners and witty conversation, rendered piquant, as it appears, by a certain flavouring of licentiousness, and took a prominent part in arranging the music, plays, and other entertainments in which the King and his courtiers delighted during the first ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... dressed. A tiny Valenciennes cap, with flaps and flap-band, of half peasant fashion, decked with rose-colored ribbons, and stuck a little backward upon bands of beautiful fair hair, surrounded her fresh and piquant face; a robe of gray levantine, and a cambric neck-kerchief, fastened to her bosom by a large tuft of rose-colored ribbons, displayed her figure elegantly rounded; a hollands apron, white as snow, trimmed below by three large hems, surmounted by a Vandyke-row, encircled her waist, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... played a high and hazardous game. Their diplomatic absurdity, which weighed the fate of nations against a dinner, found a confusion of all the solid principles on which states rest as stimulating as the piquant ragouts of the great Ude. Lucchesini, under his almost intolerable airs of sapience, as artfully veiled his incapacity in the cabinet as Ferdinand of Brunswick did his in the field, and to this may be ascribed the measures which but momentarily ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... author of Les Petites Cardinal should find that the Opera—which certainly plays a role in our politics—had been sufficiently well portrayed by the author of Monsieur le Ministre. And upon this, the first chapter of my book, Monsieur Ludovic Halevy adds, moreover, some special and piquant details which ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... many industries and busy wharves, form a piquant contrast to spick-and-span Bournemouth with her tidy gardens and well-dressed crowds; but whatever the port of Poole may lack in other ways she has an abundance of history, although her claim to figure as a Roman station has been much disputed. We do know, however, that after ...
— Bournemouth, Poole & Christchurch • Sidney Heath
... Letty that great ladies should be so beautiful. Not that this one was beautiful of face—she wasn't—only piquant—but the general effect was beautiful. It showed what money and the dressmaker could do. If she, Letty could have had a dress and a hat like this!—a blue or a green, it was difficult to say which—with these strips of jade and turquoise on a ground of the ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... of most charming abandon, revealing such a familiarity with the scenes and subjects that she writes about that no one can doubt she has been among them taking notes, while her style indicates her femininity, though there are many who doubt it. There has nothing more piquant, spicy, and unconventional ever been published in Boston, and Peppermint 'takes the ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... coming far down the road. When either of them saw it the other was summoned, and they waited tremblingly. But the landaulet always passed, with Mrs. Carter staring straight ahead, gray-haired and hook-nosed; sometimes with Miss Margaret Carter, whose softly piquant little nose would in time be hooked like her mother's. Father's treacherous ally the chauffeur never even looked at "The T Room." Sometimes Father wondered if the chauffeur knew just where the house was; perhaps he had never noticed it. He planned to wave and attract the chauffeur's attention, ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... throughout, from the parting of her jet-black hair to the high instep of her slender foot; a glancing, brilliant, brunette beauty, with the piquant charm of perpetual spirits, and the equipoise of a perfectly healthy nature. She was altogether graceful, yet she had not the fresh, free grace of her cousin Hope, who was lithe and strong as a hawthorne spray: Kate's was the ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... beauty, rank and fashion of Brighton; you will see costumes a ravir, dresses that are artistic and elegant; you will see faces beautiful and well-known; you will hear a charming ripple of conversation; you will witness many pleasant and piquant adventures; but if you want to dream; if you want to give up your whole heart and soul to the poetry of the sea; if you want to listen to its voice and hear no other; if you want to shut yourself away from the ...
— The Tragedy of the Chain Pier - Everyday Life Library No. 3 • Charlotte M. Braeme
... the others?" he repeated smiling. "Do you mean to tell me that Reuben's piquant little granddaughter is a greater belle in the neighbourhood than ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... neither to one side nor to the other. At intervals, however, the legend of the feud was embroidered with new and effective detail in the mouth of some inventive gossip, and by degrees it took high place among those piquant social histories which illustrate the real life of a town, and which parents recount to their children with such zest in moods ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... although at the end of September, had induced the occupants of the room to leave open. The sound of laughter and merriment issued from it; but this was presently hushed, and two voices, accompanied by guitars, began to sing a lively seguidilla, of which, at the end of each piquant couplet, the listeners testified their approbation by a hum of mirthful applause. Before the song was over, Luis had sought and found a means of observing what was passing within doors. Grasping the lower branch of a tree which grew within a few feet of the corner of the house, he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... this plan in his pocket will Count Munnich now go to dine with Biron and enjoy his hospitality!" laughingly exclaimed Ostermann. "Ah, that must make the dinner particularly piquant! How agreeable it must be to press the regent's hand, and at the same time feel the rustling in your pocket of the paper upon which you have drawn the plan of his Siberian prison! But you are in the right. The regent has deeply offended you. How could he ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... her prejudice and dislike. He was too clever, too keen-sighted and appreciative. Had he been indifferent toward her, and not so observant, she would have soon learned to like him and enjoy his society, for he had a bright, piquant way of talking, and was seldom at a loss for words. In fact, he had plenty of ideas, and was fast gaining more. One reason why Mildred shrank from him in strengthening repulsion was because, in his absorbing interest and his quick comprehension of her thought and feeling, ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... her arms and gazed after him with undisguised admiration. How well everything he did became him; his firing up—his brusquerie—the very movements of his body, all so piquant, charming, and unwomanly! As he vanished from her admiring eyes, she turned, with flaming cheeks, on Miss Maitland, and said, "Well, aunt, you have driven them both out at the window; now, say something pretty to Fanny and me, and drive us ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... Lady Jane's fourth, and Lady Sophia's first, began and ended. Lady Sophia was piquant and witty, with a snub nose and a playful disposition. She was a first-rate horsewoman, an exquisite waltzer, good at croquet, archery, billiards, and all games requiring accuracy of eye and aim, and Lady Sophia brought ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... had seen life enough to wear out the earlier sensibilities of adolescence. He was tired of worshipping or tyrannizing over the bistred or umbered beauties of mingled blood among whom he had been living. Even that piquant exhibition which the Rio de Mendoza presents to the amateur of breathing sculpture failed to interest him. He was thinking of a far-off village on the other side of the equator, and of the wild girl with whom he used ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Piquant contrast to these obsessions, the well-known expression of Talbot Potter lifted him above the crowd to such high serenity his face might have been that of a young Pope, with a dash of Sydney Carton. His glance fixed itself, ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... redness in his cheeks which made his head seem almost like an apple grown prematurely ripe upon that blossom laden tree. He wore the negligee scout attire and his happy-go-lucky nature was made the more piquant by the easy, humorous fashion in which he sat upon the limb, ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... the distance between them lessened, he saw that she was ravishingly pretty; far, far prettier, indeed, than any girl he knew. At least it seemed so, for it is, unfortunately, much easier for strangers to be beautiful. Aside from this advantage of mystery, the approaching vision was piquant and graceful enough to have reminded a much older boy of a spotless white kitten, for, in spite of a charmingly managed demureness, there was precisely that kind of playfulness somewhere expressed about her. Just now ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... purposely in the rear of a side box, well protected from the audience by the holders of the front positions. The criminologist appeared to relapse into dreams of bygone days, while his companion peered into the vast audience and then at the nimble limbed chorus on the stage with piquant curiosity. ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... Biography:—these are, surely, publications of no mean importance. Hearne's prefaces and appendices are gossiping enough; sometimes, however, they repay the labour of perusal by curious and unlooked-for intelligence. Yet it must be allowed that no literary cook ever enriched his dishes with such little piquant sauce, as did Hearne: I speak only of their intrinsic value, for they had a very respectable exterior—what Winstanley says of Ogilvey's publications being, applicable enough to Hearne's;—they were printed on "special good paper, and in a very good letter." We will now say ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... began to write, and describe the amatory episodes as leisure inclined me, and as they seemed to me unusually amusing or illustrative. I arranged them in order afterwards. Nothing at that time had been so piquant in my acquaintance with harlots as Kitty's had been. I had not then had much to do with lasses as young as she was, the novelty therefore I suppose made me write out her narrative intermixed with my own, at the length it ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... at the ruinous chateau which has neither doors nor windows, and which is haunted by ghosts, and the attempts to embellish the tumble-down place, and people it with gaiety, animation, and life, are so many scenes to which the piquant style of Mademoiselle gives singular attractiveness. Whilst avenues were being planted and a theatre built, matrimonial negotiations went on as briskly as ever, and pretenders to her hand abounded—the Elector of Bavaria, the Duke of Savoy, the nephew of the Duke of Lorraine, the Duke de ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... living in circles where the gaiety was hollow. The suggestion did not escape Gerald. But, then, Leslie, just turned twenty-four, was rather given to judging these days as if she remembered something less modern, an affectation found piquant by her friends in a particularly young-looking, blond girl with a short nose. Gerald might have hoped that her sigh meant nothing had not Leslie, awake to the implication of her remark as soon as she had made it, gone hurriedly on to call attention ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... eminent French Statesman and writer, read a witty, piquant essay in reprehension of War and all other contrivances for shortening human life, which, being given first in French and then substantially in English, elicited ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... they do provide a vivid glimpse into the personal life of the time, and to that extent an injection of some of these inscriptions into the anthologies of the period might help in providing a lively and piquant context for the serious artistic production of writers ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... brilliant wit (bel esprit), which the great tragedian hid beneath the splendors of his genius. He began with those writings, superfine (precieux), dainty, tricked out in the fashion of the court and the drawing-room, which suggested La Bruyere's piquant portrait. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... romantic views of life, and did not know the human character. I had not sufficient conversation with him to judge of this. He was intimate with d'Invernois, who spoke highly of him. He had certainly none of our Irish vivacity, and fulness of imagery. He was rather querulous and prolix, than piquant, and declaimed rather than said sharp things. I said to him, "Why do you not endeavour, in your writings, to accommodate yourself more to the public taste?" He answered, in despair, "I cannot—I have no turn that way. I know the value of the bon-mot, the sarcasm, and the epigram; but ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... might have told her it would be hard to forget that piquant, oval face of exquisite coloring, and those blue eyes in which the sunshine danced like gold. I might have, but I did not. Instead, I murmured that my memory ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... friends are smit With a base passion—miserable dupes Who seldom mark their own worst bane of all. The black-skinned girl is "tawny like the honey"; The filthy and the fetid's "negligee"; The cat-eyed she's "a little Pallas," she; The sinewy and wizened's "a gazelle"; The pudgy and the pigmy is "piquant, One of the Graces sure"; the big and bulky O she's "an Admiration, imposante"; The stuttering and tongue-tied "sweetly lisps"; The mute girl's "modest"; and the garrulous, The spiteful spit-fire, is "a sparkling wit"; And she who scarcely lives for scrawniness ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... theatre by the appearance of Appleton. He was coming from within the building, and with him were two women, one elderly and unattractive, the other a plump young person with bright blue eyes in a saucy face that had more claim to piquant effrontery than to beauty. She was simply dressed and ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... at last ended by the Edict of Nantes issued after Henry of Navarre became Henry IV. of France. Besides the political bearing of the letters, they give a picturesque account of Court life at the end of the 16th century, the fashions and manners of the time, piquant descriptions, and amusing gossip, such as only a witty woman—as Marguerite certainly was—could inject into such subjects. The letters, indeed, abound in sprightly anecdote and small-talk, which yet have their value in lightening ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... Ruth would not answer him, he became only the more determined that she should hear what he had to say. What that was he did not exactly know. The whole affair was most mysterious and piquant. ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... out for a walk up Elizabeth street to the post-office. The boys were just congratulating themselves that their uncomfortable, though piquant, experience of the morning was a thing definitely of the past, when ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... (February, 1520), "You cannot make a pen out of a sword: the Word of God is a sword. I was unwilling to be forced to come forward in public; and the more unwilling I am, the more I am drawn into the contest." Widely and eagerly read, these piquant publications made Luther the awakener, the developer, and as Harnack declares, the spiritual center of the reformatory thought that was now ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... I see that you are going down the steep way which leads to that daring cleverness for which fools blame successful operators. You have tasted the piquant intoxicating fruits of Parisian pleasure. You have made luxury the inseparable companion of your life. Paris begins at the Place de l'Etoile, and ends at the Jockey Club. That is your Paris, which is the ...
— Mercadet - A Comedy In Three Acts • Honore De Balzac
... intelligent mind could invent; and Nora had calmly walked over them or around. Nora's mind was Celtic: French in its adroitness and Irish in its watchfulness and tenacity. And now she had set her arts of persuasion in motion (aided by a piquant beauty) to lift a corner of the veil from ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... was the only one of our grandparents who had survived to my time,—of French descent, piquant, merry, exceedingly polite, and very fond of us children, whom he was always treating to raisins and peppermints and rules for good behavior. He had been a soldier in the Revolutionary War,—the greatest distinction we could imagine. And ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... from Ticknor & Co., of Boston, a second series of Greenwood Leaves, by the public's old favorite, GRACE GREENWOOD. The tales which it embraces are in the author's happiest vein, and the letters are dashing and piquant, but liable to some objections which we might make in a longer notice. The same publishers have issued a capital book for children, entitled Recollections of My Childhood, by the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... I really wish I could give you the story just as Pierre told it to me, with the sidelights of Indian philosophy and the natural expressions of wood lore that made his story much more piquant and picturesque than mine could ever be. Anyway, I'll do the ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton
... even for an adventuress. As a duellist at least she seemed worthy of his steel. Besides, in her gown of faint lilac and her orchid-laden hat she was a very entrancing vision. The duel might be picturesque as well as piquant. ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... of ARTAXOMINOUS Was far less terrible than—well, thrasonic. To tear a thing to tatters, shout and "cuss," In an assembly callous and sardonic, Savours a bit too much of sheer burlesque, Scarce to the level of fine acting rises. The unexpected's piquant, picturesque, But a sound drama is not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... figures ascending to tiny naked shoulders, presented a piquant contrast with the huge, black Assyrian, bull-like policemen, who guarded the passage, and reduced, by contrast, to almost doll-like proportions the white creatures who went up the great stairway. Overhead an artificial plant, some twenty feet wide, spread a decorative greenness; the walls were ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... none, which is too true, and called for Jane to reach her out of her trunk, giving her the keys to that purpose, a bundle of papers, and pulls out a paper, a copy of what, a pretty while since, she had wrote in a discontent to me, which I would not read, but burnt. She now read it, and it was so piquant, and wrote in English, and most of it true, of the retiredness of her life, and how unpleasant it was; that being wrote in English, and so in danger of being met with and read by others, I was vexed at it, and desired her and then commanded her to tear it. When she desired ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... were said in the convents, but we will spare our reader other comments of a political, metaphysical, or piquant nature and conduct him to a private house. As we have few acquaintances in Manila, let us enter the home of Capitan Tinong, the polite individual whom we saw so profusely inviting Ibarra to honor him ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... fascinating little story, with its piquant contrasts and its wild love-at-all-costs? And how many such stories are hidden about the country, lying carelessly in rustic memories, if one only ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... about as well as we do, and it but remains for us to give a daguerreotype of a few customers which landlords or their clerks and servants now and then meet. The conductor of one of our first-class houses, gives us such a truly piquant and matter-of-fact picture of his experience, that we up and copy it, believing, as we do, that the reader will see some information and ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... sounds were sportive and jocund; they rippled like laughter; they were capricious as the merriment of a coquette. Then they merged into a sweet and warbling cadence—a cadence of inimitable tenderness, the very suavity of which was rendered more piquant by its lavish variations. The measure changed, with an abrupt fling of the treble-hand: it gushed into an air quaint and sprightly as the dance of Puck—comic—odd—sparkling on the ear like zig-zags: it threw out a shower of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... your eyes of jet, Your midnight hair and your piquant chin, Your lips whose odours of violet Drive men to madness and saints to sin,— I see you over the footlights' glare Down in the pit 'mid the common mob,— Your throat is burning, and brown, and bare, ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... of the Exe. Both torrents descend from the highlands of Exmoor, and it is difficult to say which is the more beautiful. The valleys are similar, but have characteristic differences. The Barle has all the piquant charm of the mountain torrent, whilst the beauties of the Exe are of a sedater though not less pleasing character. Everywhere about Dulverton delightful landscapes may be caught, but the "show sight" is Mount Sydenham, just above the church ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... self-perception. "After sitting down, I was conscious of an enjoyment in speaking to a public assembly, and felt as if I should like to rise again. It is something like being under fire,—a sort of excitement, not exactly pleasure, but more piquant than most pleasures." Was it President Jackson, or Senator Benton, who said that fighting a duel was very much like making one's ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... humour is past, and I shall no longer attempt to make the worse appear the better cause. I dare say you thought me in earnest," she added, with slight sarcasm, "but a philosophical disquisition between two lovers on the eve of parting for ever, was too novel and piquant a seduction ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... power, not the Italy which the genius of Cavour has welded into a nation. It was a land whose interest came altogether from the past, and that lay as it were in the beauty of time's sunset. How unlike the United States! The contrast has always, I confess, seemed to me a piquant one. It has often struck me with a feeling of quaintness that the two countries which Dickens specially visited and described, were, the one this lovely land of age and hoar antiquity, and the other that young giant land of the West, ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... immense period his ardent passion had not subsided, - our hero was daily to be seen purchasing articles for which he had no earthly use, but fully recompensed for his outlay by the artless (ill-natured people said, artful) smiles, and engaging, piquant conversation of mademoiselle. Our hero, when reminded of this at a subsequent period, protested that he had thus acted merely to improve his French, and only conversed with mademoiselle for educational purposes. But we have ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... return to 'Salem for the winter, an heroic move towards gaining a still more affectionate advantage over the solitaries in Herbert Street. A little smile must have given her face its most piquant expression as she wrote:— ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... gentlemen to luncheon. Mr. Heinert proved himself a very genial and somewhat original companion. If he had ever been disheartened on account of his illness, that was all past now; and the simplicity, vivacity, and general love of play in his nature made a piquant contrast with Dr. Arthur's staid humour and grave manliness. He talked of Rollo too, whom he loved well, it was plain; he talked of Gttingen; he talked in short till Arthur ordered him back to his rooms and forbade him to come out of them ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... still we lingered, seated on the latticed balcony that encircles an inner court where cabaret features are held—suggestive of a bull ring. One rather piquant Spanish girl, playing her accompaniment on a guitar, gazed softly up at Tommy while singing about some wonderful Nirvana, an enchanted island that floated in a sea of love. It was a pretty song, even if more intense than temperate, ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... the unsophisticated palate as it goes down; but it is easy to take too much. And the cheaper the candy, the swifter the consequent revulsion of feeling. As for the staples, there is nothing very piquant about their flavor; but if they are of first quality, and if one keeps his appetite healthy, one seems to enjoy them more and more and to thrive on them three times ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... her first national story, which gave her more than a national fame, and three hundred pounds from her fascinated publisher. It contains much curious information about the antiquities and social condition of Ireland, and a passionate pleading against the wrongs of its people. It made the piquant little governess all the rage in fashionable society, and until her marriage she was known by the name of her heroine, Glorvina. As a story the book is not worth ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... provocative. Eyes, skin, hair, she was all copper-browns and crimson-bronzes, all the high gloss of satiny surfaces. Every shape and contour was a variant from the regular. Her eyes took a bewildering slant. Her face showed a little piquant stress on the cheekbones. Her hair banded in a long, solid, club-like braid. In repose she bore a look a little sullen, a little heavy. When she smiled, it seemed as if her whole face waked up; but it was only the glitter of white teeth in the slit ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... misery. It gives a spice to the feast to some of them, others dull their uneasy conscience with it. And yet all they eat and drink has been made by the poor man; even the choicest dainties have passed through his dirty hands and have a piquant flavor of sweat and hunger. They look upon it as a matter of course that it should be so; they are not even surprised that nothing is ever done in gratitude for kind treatment— something to disagree with them, a little poison, for instance. Just think! There are millions of poor ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... but, at that moment, from up the aisle sounded a sibilant "S-s-s-s!" They turned to see a somewhat untidy fluff of red hair above a laughing, piquant face. ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... bowed his head upon his hand, and spoke no word. Drilled to conceal his emotions, he seemed outwardly calm, though it cost him a pang to relinquish the captivating young creature, who he felt would have made his life musical, though by piquant contrast rather than by harmony. After a brief, troubled silence, he rose and walked toward the window, as if desirous to avoid looking the lady in the face. After a while, he said, slowly, "Do you deem ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... gratification of my palate they paid the most unwearied attention. They continually invited me to partake of food, and when after eating heartily I declined the viands they continued to offer me, they seemed to think that my appetite stood in need of some piquant stimulant to ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... very little water until tender, glazing with tart jelly, and crisping in the oven after draining and cooling. Or soak two hours in cold water, then cover completely with an inch-thick crust of flour and water mixed stiff, and bake in a slow oven four to five hours. Serve always with very piquant sauce, and sharp pickle, or highly spiced catsups. Make jelly from wild grapes, wild plums, green grapes, green gooseberries or crab apples, using half the usual amount of ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... than I thought," she returned in English; and in English that was piquant because it could not help being just the least bit French as well. "Much better—because, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... those girls," he said at last; "what are their names?—I am sure I know about them. Nay, let me ask you a question—Is not one called Jasmine? Has she not a piquant face, and very soft and yet bright eyes, and a great lot of curly brown hair? Yes, Miss Egerton, I am sure the girls you speak of are in a certain sense my girls; for if they are the ones I mean I took them under ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... exquisitely with the dazzling whiteness of her fine fresh complexion. At the commencement of her supreme power, the Empress still liked to adorn her head in the morning with a red madras handkerchief, which gave her a most piquant Creole air, and rendered her ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... that he had ever known. Her image, as she stood there at the altar with flashing eyes and flaming cheeks and scathing tongue defying him, was ever before his mind's eye. There was something about that girl so spirited, so piquant and original that she impressed even his apathetic nature as no other woman had ever been able to do. But what most of all attracted him to Capitola was her diablerie. He longed to catch that little savage to his bosom and have her at his mercy. The aversion she had exhibited ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... nightgowns, white wings, and the same straight yellow hair parted in the middle. They were serious, even melancholy; and we had no desire to have any traffic with them. These bright bejewelled little persons, however, piquant of face and radiant of feather, were evidently hatched from quite a different egg, and we felt we might have interests in common with them. Short-nosed, shock headed, with mouths that went up at the corners and with ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... heaven, and come down again here below, where we shall find nothing happy, nay, nothing tolerable, without my presence and assistance. And in the first place consider how providently nature has took care that in all her works there should be some piquant smack and relish of Folly: for since the Stoics define wisdom to be conducted by reason, and folly nothing else but the being hurried by passion, lest our life should otherwise have been too dull and inactive, that creator, who out of clay first tempered and made us up, put into the composition ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... than in one of the larger pieces left, which, being cracked, gave her such a resemblance to a certain old fisherman with a broken nose, who was her special aversion, that she hated to look at herself, which was, possibly, not a bad thing, for she was in danger of growing vain of her pretty, piquant face ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... quite loosely by this hinge, and will slide easily in and out of the case. When tucked away inside the case a little flirt of the hand, a turn of the wrist, will throw them out and they can be lifted to a piquant little nose in the most ...
— Little Folks' Handy Book • Lina Beard
... she emerged suddenly a glimmering, shimmering little oriental figure of satin and silver and haunting sandalwood—a veritable little incandescent rainbow of spangled moonlight and flaming scarlet and dark purple shadows. Great, heavy, jet-black curls caught back from her small piquant face by a blazing rhinestone fillet,—cheeks just a tiny bit over-tinted with rouge and excitement,—big, red-brown eyes packed full of high lights like a startled fawn's,—bold in the utter security of her masquerade, ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... appeal against Robert's opinion, therefore his sister was compelled to yield; but she disapproved entirely of the piquant neatness of Caroline's costume, and the ladylike grace of her appearance. Something more solid and homely she would have considered ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... village banker. Thus, even in childhood, there was thrown around her the glamour of position and reputed wealth—advantages which have their value among the most democratic folk, although slight outward deference may be paid to their possessors. It was the charming little face itself, with its piquant smiles and still more piquant pouts, which won Albert's boyish admiration. The fact that she was the banker's daughter only fired his ambition to be and to do something to make her ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe |
