This is

• This is: when Victor Hugo visited the site of Waterloo in 1861, a local woman pointed out some of the sites to him: "That [crater] was made by a French cannon-ball. And that hole up there in the door, that was made by a bullet from a biscayen, a gun firing canister-shot. It didn't go right through."

— C'est un boulet français qui a fait ça, lui dit-elle. Et elle ajouta:

— Ce que vous voyez là, plus haut, dans la porte, près d'un clou, c'est le trou d'un gros biscayen. Le biscayen n'a pas traversé le bois.

• This is: in Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud recounts a joke about Wellington that von Falke heard at a waxworks in Ireland: "Von Falke brought home a particularly good example of representation by the opposite from a journey to Ireland ... The scene was a wax-work show ... A guide was conducting a company of old and young visitors from figure to figure and commenting on them: ‘This is the Duke of Wellington and his horse,’ he explained. Whereupon a young lady asked: ‘Which is the Duke of Wellington and which is the horse?’ ‘Just as you like, my pretty child,’ was the reply. ‘You pays your money and you takes your choice.’"

• This is: Adaline Glasheen suggests that the House That Jack Built rhythms of the Museyrom episode are based on Horace Walpole's letter to Miss Berry about the Gunning scandal to the tune of the Cow with the Crumpled Horn, beginning: "This is the note that nobody wrote." Rattle was Walpole's word for gossip and at 072.06 he is called Horace the Rattler
  • The Gunnings
  • 2 June 1791