The Keepers of the People

"the broad road that leadeth to destruction" — Matthew vii. 13.

"What is laughter? Thorns crackling under a pot?" — Ecclesiastes vii. 6: "For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool." This is the sentence on which Prince Ralph condemns him, and the reader should notice that the whole trial has narrowed to a quarrel about one verse of scripture: the missionary quotes the Preacher against laughter, and the Prince answers that "the people that is joyous is the people that is good," which is not a text but is a good deal closer to the Gospels than the Preacher is.

"wantoning it here in purple and fine linen" — Luke xvi. 19, the rich man in the parable of Dives and Lazarus: "clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day."

"For not a sparrow falls to the ground but He heeds it!" — Matthew x. 29: "Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father." He is dragged out shouting it, and the words come back down the corridor three times, fainter each time.

the black alpaca coat to which he had clung — a cheap, hard-wearing clerical coat: the badge of the poorly paid missionary, and, as Prince Ralph immediately sees, the whole of his theology. "You wished to dress them in black?"

"the young man was a papist. It is no business of mine" — the missionary refuses to read the burial service over the dead poet. The refusal is the first thing we learn about him and settles the rest.

Chapter xviii

"The English law only allows divorce when the wife is unfaithful, or the husband cruel" — Lord Lisdor's summary of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 is approximately right and instructively wrong. Under that Act a husband could divorce his wife for adultery alone; a wife had to prove her husband's adultery and an aggravating offence — cruelty, desertion, bigamy, incest or worse. Cruelty by itself was never a ground for either. The asymmetry stood until 1923. The Varandal law that replaces it — that a childless couple who no longer love one another shall be freed, on the word of both — is more liberal than anything England would have for seventy years, and Jepson puts it in the mouth of an absolute monarch who has just had the wife in the case condemned to death.

Chapter xix

"I am a Falcon: were we men, and I had robbed you of a mistress, by every tradition of the family I should give you satisfaction" — duelling had been effectively dead in England since the 1840s, and a duel between two women was never anything but a curiosity of the Continental press. Ruth's reasoning is that the obligation is a family one and therefore sexless, which is the single most Varandal sentence any English character speaks in the book.