The Snow Man - 4 Author:George Sand Volume: 4 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1898 Original Publisher: Little, Brown, and company Subjects: Fiction / General Fiction / Classics Fiction / Historical Fiction / Literary Fiction / Short Stories Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and the... more »re may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: III. /Tt1STIANO was acting as we do in certain dreams, when we feel drawn on to accomplish some improbable thing without being able to tell how. Were not all his surroundings utterly improbable? This fantastic chateau, called the new chateau, in opposition to the ruin of Stollborg, but dating back, in reality, to the time of Queen Catherine, and which, with its splendor and gayety, seemed to have fallen from the clonds into the bosom of a savage desert ; these avenues of naked rock and furious waters, over which, thanks to the winter, cle- gaut equipages made their way without difficulty, although it seemed as if they must be utterly impassable ; the rows of lights outlining against the darkness the principal walls with flieir thick towers, crowned with coppered roofs surmounted by huge spires ; the main building long, irregularly flanked with square pavilions, and finished off with gigantic gables notched with statues and emblems; the great clock in the central pavilion, which was striking ten o'clock at night, -- an hour when the very bears are afraid to stir the snow where they lie cowering, but when man, the most delicate animal of creation, dances in silk stockings with bare-shouldered women; everything in the savage grandeur of the situation and the courtly scene filling it with animation, even to the playful and quaint harmony of the old-fashioned French music blending unceremoniously with the sharp whistling of the wind in t...« less