Ouida
Ouida (1839-1908) was the pseudonym for the English novelist Maria Louise Ramé, known for writing novels that romanticized a fashionable lifestyle. She got this name from the pronunciation of her childhood nickname “Louisa.” In her early twenties she moved to London and began voraciously writing, publishing numerous novels, which gained her wealth and fame. She threw elaborate parties at the Langham Hotel, inviting literary figures that inspired the characters in her books. At the height of her fame, Ouida moved to Italy and lived an extravagant lifestyle. In her later life, this extravagance, along with the lack of sales in her books, left her penniless. She died in poverty in Italy at the age of 69.
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Reviews for A Dog of Flanders
2 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A classic story of love and devotion, set in a world that sees only monetary worth.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Sweet, in the despairing style - like The Little Match Girl. An innocent boy and the dog who loves him are abused by indifference and casual cruelty until, just before everything would have changed, they die. I was crying at the end...but it's so sweet it's saccharine. I would have preferred if he were rescued in time, and actually went on to express his skill in art - or otherwise developed beyond the innocent scapegoat he is here. I'm glad I read it (and it was a very quick read) but I doubt I'll reread.
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A Dog of Flanders - Ouida
Project Gutenberg's A Dog of Flanders, by Louisa de la Ramê, AKA Óuida
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: A Dog of Flanders
Author: Louisa de la Ramê, AKA Óuida
Release Date: March, 2005 [EBook #7766] This file was first posted on May 15, 2003 Last Updated: May 3, 2013
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A DOG OF FLANDERS ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, S. R. Ellison, Ted Garvin, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
A DOG OF FLANDERS
By Louisa De La Ramê
(Óuida)
Illustrated In Color By Maria L. Kirk
ILLUSTRATIONS
NELLO, AWAKENED FROM HIS SLEEP, RAN TO HELP WITH THE REST
THEN LITTLE NELLO TOOK HIS PLACE BESIDE THE CART
NELLO DREW THEIR LIKENESS WITH A STICK OF CHARCOAL
THE PORTALS OF THE CATHEDRAL WERE UNCLOSED AFTER THE MIDNIGHT MASS
A DOG OF FLANDERS
A STORY OF NÖEL
[Illustration]
Nello and Patrasche were left all alone in the world.
They were friends in a friendship closer than brotherhood. Nello was a little Ardennois—Patrasche was a big Fleming. They were both of the same age by length of years, yet one was still young, and the other was already old. They had dwelt together almost all their days: both were orphaned and destitute, and owed their lives to the same hand. It had been the beginning of the tie between them, their first bond of sympathy; and it had strengthened day by day, and had grown with their growth, firm and indissoluble, until they loved one another very greatly. Their home was a little hut on the edge of a little village—a Flemish village a league from Antwerp, set amidst flat breadths of pasture and corn-lands, with long lines of poplars and of alders bending in the breeze on the edge of the great canal which ran through it. It had about a score of houses and homesteads, with shutters of bright green or sky-blue, and roofs rose-red or black and white, and walls white-washed until they shone in the sun like snow. In the centre of the village stood a windmill, placed on a little moss-grown slope: it was a landmark to all the level country round. It had once been painted scarlet, sails and all, but that had been in its infancy, half a century or more earlier, when it had ground wheat for the soldiers of Napoleon; and it was now a ruddy brown, tanned by wind and weather. It went queerly by fits and starts, as though rheumatic and stiff in the joints from age, but it served the whole neighborhood, which would have thought it almost as impious to carry grain elsewhere as to attend any other religious service than the mass that was performed at the altar of the little old gray church, with its conical steeple, which stood opposite to it, and whose single bell rang morning, noon, and night with that strange, subdued, hollow sadness which every bell that hangs in the Low Countries seems to gain as an integral part of its melody.
Within sound of the little melancholy clock almost from their birth upward, they had dwelt together, Nello and Patrasche, in the little hut on the edge of the village, with the cathedral spire of Antwerp rising in the north-east, beyond the great green plain of seeding grass and spreading corn that stretched away from them like a tideless, changeless sea. It was the hut of a very old man, of a very poor man—of old Jehan Daas, who in his time had been a soldier, and who remembered the wars that had trampled the country as oxen tread down the furrows, and who had brought from his service nothing except a wound, which had made him a cripple.
When old Jehan Daas had reached his full eighty, his daughter had died in the Ardennes, hard by Stavelot, and had left him in legacy her two-year-old son. The old man could ill contrive to support himself, but he took up the additional burden uncomplainingly, and it soon became welcome and precious to him. Little Nello—-which was but a pet diminutive for Nicolas—throve with him, and the old man and the little child lived in the poor little hut contentedly.
It was a very humble little mud-hut indeed, but it was clean and white as a sea-shell, and stood in a small plot of garden-ground that yielded beans and herbs and pumpkins. They were very poor, terribly poor—many a day they had nothing at all to eat. They never by any chance had enough: to have had enough to eat would have been to have reached paradise at once. But the old man was very gentle and good to the boy, and the boy was a beautiful, innocent, truthful, tender-hearted creature; and they were happy on a crust and a few leaves of cabbage, and asked no more of earth or heaven; save indeed that