The golden journey of Mr. Paradyne by William John Locke
The golden journey of Mr. Paradyne by William John Locke is a novella written in the early 20th century. It traces a brilliant but spiritually numb barrister’s abrupt awakening from a stifling domestic and professional routine into a vagabond pursuit of beauty, art, and freedom. Cosmo Paradyne, K.C., a meticulous Chancery lawyer living a lifeless existence in Ealing, is bewitched one night by a mysterious young flageolet player and, after a break
in memory, wakes in a caravan near Chartres, France. Discovering he has spent months as an itinerant hawker, he tastes robust health, simple food, and the spell of the countryside, and is shaken by the grandeur of Chartres Cathedral and a sudden awareness of sensuous, vital life absent from his marriage to the cold, practical Martha. Her terse telegram dismisses his “loss of memory,” underscoring the emptiness he is poised to resume. When he plays the silver flageolet flawlessly, he recalls winning it from the young musician with an invitation to roam through France, Italy, and Sicily. At dawn, choosing desire over duty, he harnesses his horse and sets out southward, leaving his old, “dead” life for the golden journey. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Read or download for free
For an overview of the different reading options, see our Reading Guide
| Reading Options | Url | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read now! | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78127.html.images | 92 kB | |||
| EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78127.epub3.images | 1.3 MB | |||
| EPUB (older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78127.epub.images | 1.3 MB | |||
| EPUB (no images, older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78127.epub.noimages | 165 kB | |||
| Kindle | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78127.kf8.images | 1.9 MB | |||
| older Kindles | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78127.kindle.images | 1.9 MB | |||
| Plain Text UTF-8 | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78127.txt.utf-8 | 74 kB | |||
| Download HTML (zip) | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/78127/pg78127-h.zip | 1.2 MB | |||
| There may be more files related to this item. | |||||
Similar Books
About this eBook
| Author | Locke, William John, 1863-1930 |
|---|---|
| Artist | Foster, Marcia Lane, 1897-1983 |
| Title | The golden journey of Mr. Paradyne |
| Original Publication | London: John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd., 1924. |
| Credits | Tom Trussel, Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | PR: Language and Literatures: English literature |
| Subject | Voyages and travels -- Fiction |
| Subject | Runaway husbands -- Fiction |
| Subject | Middle-aged men -- Fiction |
| Subject | Lawyers -- Fiction |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 78127 |
| Release Date | Mar 6, 2026 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 4968 downloads in the last 30 days. |
| Project Gutenberg eBooks are always free! | |