Balzac, or Flaubert, or that most terrible writer of the modern French school of fiction, the author of 'Le sabot Rouge,' never described peasant life with more downright veracity.
"George Eliot"
Mathilde Blind
Save for the absence of the blouse and the sabot you might, picking your way through the mud in a street in the lower part of the city, imagine yourself in some quarters of Dieppe or Calais, or any other of the busier towns in the north of France.
"Faces and Places"
Henry William Lucy
This feeling was with him no affectation, but the deliberate, final conclusion of his life-he reverenced the sabot and the blouse, the implements of tillage and work, as the Greek did his gods and the implements of war and glory; he saw humanity reduced to its simplest and most noble physical functions and possibilities, as the Greek did the perfection of the physical form, but he lacked the perception of the types of pure beauty of the Greek.
"The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I"
William James Stillman