Gaston de Latour

Cover

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Title Page, Copyright

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Contents

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pp. vii-viii

List of Illustrations

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pp. ix-

Acknowledgements

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pp. x-

I wish to thank Ms. Catherine Jones and her sisters, residual legatees of Walter Pater's estate, for graciously extending permission for the publication of Walter Pater's Gaston manuscripts. Grateful acknowledgements is also made for use of the following manuscripts: ...

Frequently Cited Sources & Abbreviated References

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pp. xi-xii

Annotational & Transcriptional Format

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pp. xiii-xvi

Introduction

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pp. xvii-xlvi

Pater began work on Gaston de Latour shortly after or possibly even before finishing Marius the Epicurean (1885). Between June and October, 1888, he published the first five chapters of Gaston in Macmillan's Magazine; then, possibly unable to sustain the monthly pace or, as some have speculated, ...

Chapter I: A Clerk in Orders

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pp. 1-13

The white walls of the Château of Deux-manoirs composed, before its dismantling at the Revolution, the one prominent object which towards the south-west broke the pleasant level of La Beauce, the great corn-land of central France. Abode in those days of the family of Latour, it bore significant record of their brotherly union, ...

Chapter II: Our Lady's Church

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pp. 14-24

Like a ship for ever asail in the distance, thought the child, everywhere the great church of Chartres was visible, with the passing light or shadow upon its grey, weather-beaten surfaces. The people of La Beauce were proud, and would talk often of its rich store of sacred furniture, the wonderworking relics of "Our Lady under the Earth," ...

Chapter III: Modernity

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pp. 25-37

The besieging armies disappeared like the snow, leaving city and suburb in all the hardened soilure of war and winter, which only the torrents of spring would carry away. And the spring came suddenly: it was pleasant, after that long confinement, to walk afar securely, through its early fervours. Gaston, too, went forth, on his way home, not alone. ...

Chapter IV: Peach-blossom and Wine

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pp. 38-46

Those searchings of mind brought with them from time to time a cruel start from sleep, a sudden shudder at any wide out-look over life and its issues, draughts of mental east-wind across the hot mornings, into which the voices of his companions called him, to lose again in long rambles every thought save that of his own firm, abounding youth. ...

Chapter V: Suspended Judgment

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pp. 47-59

The diversity, the undulancy of human nature!—so deep a sense of it accompanied Montaigne always that himself, too, seemed to be ever changing colour sympathetically therewith. Those innumerable differences, mental and physical, of which men had always been aware, on which they had so largely fed their vanity, were ultimate. ...

Chapter VI: Shadows of Events

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pp. 60-67

We all feel, I suppose, the pathos of that mythic situation in Homer, where the Greeks at the last throb of battle around the body of Patroclus find the horror of supernatural darkness added to their other foes; feel it through some touch of truth to our own experience how the malignancy of the forces against us may be doubled by their uncertainty ...

Chapter VII: The Lower Pantheism

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pp. 68-83

Those who were curious in tracing the symmetries of chance or destiny felt now quite secure in the observation that of nine French kings of the name, every third Charles had been a madman. Over the exotic, nervous creature who had inherited so many delicacies of organisation, the coarse rage or rabies of the wolf, ...

Chapter VIII: An Empty House

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pp. 84-91

Beauty and ugliness: no! one could never persuade one's self that these were "coincident" or "indifferent" in this Paris of the Renaissance—this garden of all the trees of which according to Bruno's doctrine, Bruno's new religion, one might freely eat. ...

Chapter IX: A Poison-daisy

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pp. 92-99

That laugh in the moon-lit street was partly at sight of a well-known object,—assez recognoissable pour estre doré, et de velours jaune garny d'argent,—the carriage of Queen Margaret of Navarre, who had stepped forth lightly at the street-corner and, gliding along the shadowed side of the way, ...

Chapter X: Anteros

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pp. 100-110

The physiology of love, from the days of Plato to our own—the days of Stendhal and Michelet—has had its students analysing, more or less ingeniously, the phenomena of its diseased or healthy action, not always with entire theoretic disinterestedness, yet driving, amid the complexities, the thousand-fold casuistries ...

Chapter XI: The Tyrant

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pp. 111-124

Was Margaret after all indeed the mirror of her time, or that other, her brother, on the throne? In an age so spontaneous and sincere, in its devotion to antiquity wearing its well-dusted antique lore like some fresh flower of to-day, the features of "The Tyrant," as Suetonius and Lampridius had conceived him, ...

Chapter XII: A Wedding

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pp. 125-127

To crown the lad's good fortune, a husband of the Queen's lineage has been found for Jasmin's pretty but penniless sister; and glad for once to find himself in loco parentis, he was astir almost with the first light of the flighty March morning, to prepare himself for the duty of giving away the bride. ...

Chapter XIII: Mi-carême

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pp. 128-136

The foreground of life, its sins, its beauty and sorrow, the spectacular contrasts of the incidents, the actors from which one could not take one's eyes:—the reader, it is hoped, can still see Gaston through the admiration and distress, the perplexity also, excited in him as he gazes thereon, so absorbed, ...

Explanatory Annotation to the Edition Text

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pp. 137-230

Apparatus Criticus to the Edition Text

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pp. 231-232

Diplomatic Transcription : Brasenose / Houghton Holographs

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pp. 233-308

Emendations & Variants

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pp. 309-326

Appendix

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pp. 327-329

Back Cover

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