Marius thought that it would be wise to profit by Jondrette’s absence to return home; moreover, it was growing late; every evening, Ma’am Bougon when she set out for her dish-washing in town, had a habit of locking the door, which was always closed at dusk.
— from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

Our government, like everything else, must follow the law of its being, or die.
— from The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912 by James H. (James Henderson) Blount

Now they gradually learned English, English manners, and acquired the English spirit.
— from The Chautauquan, Vol. 03, December 1882 A Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Promotion of True Culture. Organ of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle by Chautauqua Institution

A servant-woman, who slept out, attended to the harder and dirtier housework; Madame Zola the younger took charge of most of the cooking, and it was amid these conditions, in this little pavilion behind No. 14, Rue de La Condamine, that the young author, who had but lately completed his twenty-ninth year, resolutely set to work upon one of the greatest literary efforts ever made, one which not only embraced a most painstaking study of a period and its people, but imported into fiction, for the first time in its history, virtually every application of the scientific theory of atavism.
— from Émile Zola, Novelist and Reformer: An Account of His Life & Work by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

There followed a brief space of liberty in Genoa, liberty endangered every moment by the quarrels of the nobles, who at last proposed to divide the city among them, and would have thus destroyed their fatherland, had not Il Moro, Ludovico Sforza of Milan, intervened and possessed himself of Genoa, which he held till 1499, when Louis XII of France defeated him, Genoa placing herself under his protection.
— from Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa With Sixteen Illustrations in Colour by William Parkinson and Sixteen Other Illustrations, Second Edition by Edward Hutton