16th Century

Each age, it might be said, gets the Faust it deserves. From the 16th century on, novelists, playwrights and opera composers have gone to the mat with this icon of Western literature, grappling over the nature of good and evil, God and the devil, redemption and condemnation. Indeed, the Who's Who of Faust adapters includes writers Christopher Marlowe, Gotthold Lessing, Heinrich Heine and Thomas Mann, and composers Charles Gounod and Hector Berlioz.

Re "Stamp of Approval for Mexicanos," Commentary, Jan. 3: "The Southwest is still Mexico," writes Jose Antonio Burciaga. Actually, it isn't. It is true that Spanish claims to the Southwest date to the 16th Century. However, while Spain carried out extensive settlement in Mexico, its leaders left the lands north of the Rio Grande virtually untouched. Early in the 1800s, three centuries after the coming of the Spaniards, the largest town in the Southwest was Santa Fe, population 6,000.

In the recent novel "The Glass Palace," author Amitav Ghosh describes dinner at a home in Malaya--fish cooked with pink ginger buds, prawns roasted in pandanus leaves, and chicken with blue flowers. "With every morsel their mouths were filled with new tastes, flavors that were as unfamiliar as they were delicious," he writes. The visitor says she's never eaten anything so wonderful and asks where it is from.

The Raiders didn't realize it at the time but they were getting a good deal more than a football player when they were signing the Right Honorable Lester Hayes, Esq. Lester, you see, sees into the future. Oh, he's not Nostradamus or Jeane Dixon. Hayes stops well short of world wars but he's very good at Super Bowls.

The scene has changed barely at all in this century. If you look down Rue Saint Dominique today and compare it with a photo taken around 1910, you will see the Eiffel Tower hovering over the same frenetic, curving street crowded with little shops, busy pedestrians and frustrated traffic. Some men wore boater straw hats then and all women wore dresses down to their ankles, and many vehicles were still horse-drawn buggies. But then and now the scene offered, and offers, the heart of Paris.

Had it not been getting dark and had my wife and I not needed a place to stay, we would probably have missed the Chateau de Barbentane. We were exploring the Avignon area by car and stumbled upon Castel Mouisson, a memorable little hotel. It's about 11 miles from Avignon on the outskirts of the Provencal town of Barbentane, which sits against the Montagnette hills. The next morning, touring Barbentane on foot, we followed a sign down a narrow road from the main street and discovered Chateau de Barbentane, a 17th-Century mansion still occupied by the Marquis and Marquise of Barbentane and filled with a collection of Louis XIV and early Provencal furniture.

There are plenty of reasons to visit Querétaro, but it's the instability and conflict and violence that finally won me over. The instability of 1810, that is. The conflict of 1848. The violence of 1867. All set amid 18th century colonial architecture, surrounded these days by commerce and calm. Coming to this city in Mexico's central highlands, about 130 miles northwest of Mexico City, you get a glimpse of the 19th century days when Mexico was busy breaking free of Spain, losing about half of its land to the U.S., then deposing and executing a foreign-born monarch.

IN 1895, at a time when diet reformers had made "pie" a dirty word, "The Century Cookbook" felt obliged to note that mince pie ("the most indigestible of all") was still "the one universally accepted as a treat, and seldom refused by the scoffer." Half a century earlier, the influential writer Sarah Josepha Hale made the same point, rather testily: "The custom of eating mince pies at Christmas was too firmly rooted for the 'Pilgrim Fathers' to abolish; so it would be vain for me to attempt it.

A small wooden cabinet went up for auction on EBay. Inside were two locks of hair, one granite slab, one dried rosebud, one goblet, two wheat pennies, one candlestick and, allegedly, one "dibbuk," a kind of spirit popular in Yiddish folklore. The seller, a Missouri college student named Iosif Nietzke, described the container as a "haunted Jewish wine cabinet box" that had plagued several owners with rotten luck and a spate of bizarre paranormal stunts.

A new study has found that an infusion of feces from a healthy person into an ailing patient's gut was significantly more effective than a traditional antibiotic treatment - raising hopes that the unconventional approach could one day help combat obesity, food allergies and a host of other maladies. The study, published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, demonstrated that the fecal transplant cleared up a recurrent bacterial infection far more reliably than the routinely prescribed medication.