The merchants began to snuff the cadaverous haut goût of lucrative war; the freighting business never was so lively, on account of the prodigious taking up for transport service: great orders for provisions of all kinds, new clothing for the troops, puts life into the woollen manufactures.

Pollution levels are almost always higher in cities rather than the countryside, what with the cars, industry and so on.

[discussing numquam in the Old French portion of the Oaths of Strasbourg] a Latinizing spelling, maybe a pure Latinism, not surviving in modern French (but cf. Old French onques < umquam ‘ever’). Note the double negative, literally ‘will never make no pact’

Am I bored? Not a bit of it!