The Ox Is Slow This is a tale of two families and it is here where the similarity ends. From the 15th and 16th centuries, the Belmont family culture had been based on military leadership, with its aristocratic identity conventions. In 1830, Pierre Belmont was acting as a military advisor to the French court of King Louis Phillippe. Satisfied with their lifestyles, he could envisage no serious alteration to his and his family's way of life. At that time, John Marshall and his wife Caroline were living in England, near a small Norfolk village named Walpole St. Peter. Born into poverty, John was an itinerant farm labourer, unable to read or write, with only a basic understanding of arithmetic. He, like Pierre Belmont, could see no reasons for his or Caroline's existence to change or improve. But, eleven centuries before, an ancient Phoenician proverb began to sew the threads of a human fabric that would have been beyond the imagination of both these men. It was known as the Y Aphorism.