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"Nest-ce pas que c'est beau?"
How soft are the nights of the Continent! How bland, balmy, safe! No sea-fog; no chilling damp: mistless as noon, and fresh as morning.
Courage, mon ami! Un peu de sangfroid--un peu d'aplomb, M. Lucien, et tout ira bien."
Work or suffering found her listless and dejected, powerless and repining; but gaiety expanded her butterfly's wings, lit up their gold-dust and bright spots, made her flash like a gem, and flush like a flower.
"cette jeune fille magnifique aux cheveux noirs comme le jais."
Not at all. She turned me and herself round; she viewed us both on all sides; she smiled, she waved her curls, she retouched her sash, she spread her dress, and finally, letting go my arm, and curtseying with mock respect, she said: "I would not be you for a kingdom."
cela suffit: je n'en veux pas.
but one with whom I can talk on equal terms--who does not plague and bore, and harass me with depths, and heights, and passions, and talents for which I have no taste.
Colonel de Hamal?"
"though scentless when entire, yield fragrance when they're bruised."
my task was not the least onerous, being to imbue some ninety sets of brains with a due tincture of what they considered a most complicated and difficult science, that of the English language; and to drill ninety tongues in what, for them, was an almost impossible pronunciation--the lisping and hissing dentals of the Isles.
A goad thrust me on, a fever forbade me to rest; a want of companionship maintained in my soul the cravings of a most deadly famine.
then, with the prelude usual, I said:--"Mon
I took it, and we descended one flight of carpeted steps to a landing where a tall door, standing open, gave admission into the blue-damask room.
trick of eye and lip,
fortune had retrenched her once abundant gifts.
Adversity might set against him her most sullen front: he was the man to beat her down with smiles. Strong and cheerful, and firm and courteous; not rash, yet valiant; he was the aspirant to woo Destiny herself, and to win from her stone eyeballs a beam almost loving.
and after the morning hours were gone by,--those hours which always bring, even to the necessarily unoccupied, a sense of business to be done, of tasks waiting fulfilment, a vague impression of obligation to be employed--when this stirring time was past,
He used to be slender as an eel, and now I fancy in him a sort of heavy dragoon bent--a beef-eater tendency. Graham, take notice! If you grow fat I disown you."
To "sit in sunshine calm and sweet" is said to be excellent for weak people; it gives them vital force. When little Georgette Beck was recovering from her illness, I used to take her in my arms and walk with her in the garden by the hour together, beneath a certain wall hung with grapes, which the Southern sun was ripening: that sun cherished her little pale frame quite as effectually as it mellowed and swelled the clustering fruit.
There are human tempers, bland, glowing, and genial, within whose influence it is as good for the poor in spirit to live, as it is for the feeble in frame to bask in the glow of noon.
Transition from the preceeding
liked to visit the picture-galleries, and I dearly liked to be left there alone. In company, a wretched idiosyncracy forbade me to see much or to feel anything. In unfamiliar company, where it was necessary to maintain a flow of talk on the subjects in presence, half an hour would knock me up, with a combined pressure of physical lassitude and entire mental incapacity. I never yet saw the well- reared child, much less the educated adult, who could not put me to shame, by the sustained intelligence of its demeanour under the ordeal of a conversable, sociable visitation of pictures, historical
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It was pleasant also to tell him some things he did not know--he listened so kindly, so teachably; unformalized by scruples lest so to bend his bright handsome head, to gather a woman's rather obscure and stammering explanation, should imperil the dignity of his manhood.
Thus must I soon again listen and wander; and this shadow of the future stole with timely sobriety across the radiant present.
With one of these beauties I once had the honour and rapture to be perfectly acquainted: the inert force of the deep, settled love she bore herself, was wonderful; it could only be surpassed by her proud impotency to care for any other living thing.
caustic that burned to the bone; his eye shot no morose shafts
Her parents have a large family: they occupy such a station and possess such connections as, in their opinion, demand display; stringent necessity of circumstances and inherent thoughtlessness of disposition combined, have engendered reckless unscrupulousness as to how they obtain the means of sustaining a good appearance. This is the state of things, and the only state of things, she has seen from childhood upwards."
I would rather wed a paysanne in a short petticoat and high cap--and be sure that she was honest."
I took off my pink dress and lace mantle with happier feelings than I had experienced in putting them on. Not all, perhaps, who had shone brightly arrayed at that concert could say the same; for not all had been satisfied with friendship--with its calm comfort and modest hope.
Tickled only by demographic similarity, I have frequently thought of Jane Austen during this read, but this is the first passage that I think could have been written by her.
I remembered the very shapes of the paving-stones which I had noted with idle eye, while, with a thick-beating heart, I waited the unclosing of that door at which I stood--a solitary and a suppliant.
bend the knee
She kept her word, and watched me through a night's rest; but at dawn Reason relieved the guard.
through the rest of the house it was cold, with the nipping severity of a continental winter:
By degrees, a composite feeling of blended strength and pain wound itself wirily round my heart, sustained, or at least restrained, its throbbings, and made me fit for the day's work. I lifted my head.
viewing with a mixture of fire and fear the first entrance of the breaker-in."
fortnight passed; I was getting once more inured to the harness of school, and lapsing from the passionate pain of change to the palsy of custom.
in short, did her work like the neat-handed Phillis she could be when she those. Having given me my handkerchief and gloves, she took the candle and lighted me down-stairs.
Deeply did I feel myself privileged in having a place before that stage; I longed to see a being of whose powers I had heard reports which made me conceive peculiar anticipations. I wondered if she would justify her renown: with strange curiosity, with feelings severe and austere, yet of riveted interest, I waited. She was a study of such nature as had not encountered my eyes yet: a great and new planet she was: but in what shape? I waited her rising.
She rose at nine that December night: above the horizon I saw her come.
The pale cliffs of his own England do not look down on the tides of the Channel more calmly than he watched the Pythian inspiration of that night.
Announced by a servant in livery, we entered a drawing-room whose hearth glowed with an English fire, and whose walls gleamed with foreign mirrors.
Those who live in retirement, whose lives have fallen amid the seclusion of schools or of other walled-in and guarded dwellings, are liable to be suddenly and for a long while dropped out of the memory of their friends, the denizens of a freer world.
"It is quite right: it ought to be so, since so it is."
Acceptance
Of course I did not blame myself for suffering: I thank God I had a truer sense of justice than to fall into any imbecile extravagance of self-accusation;
Blame yourself
It was a day of winter east wind, and I had now for some time entered into that dreary fellowship with the winds and their changes, so little known, so incomprehensible to the healthy. The north and east owned a terrific influence, making all pain more poignant, all sorrow sadder. The south could calm, the west sometimes cheer: unless, indeed, they brought on their wings the burden of thunder-clouds, under the weight and warmth of which all energy died.
"Still he needs keeping in order, and correcting, and repressing, and I do him that good service;
Also, how very wise it is in people placed in an exceptional position to hold their tongues and not rashly declare how such position galls them! The world can understand well enough the process of perishing for want of food: perhaps few persons can enter into or follow out that of going mad from solitary confinement.
"And you are little Polly?"
Accustomed to instruct foreign girls, who hardly ever will think and study for themselves-- who have no idea of grappling with a difficulty, and overcoming it by dint of reflection or application--our progress, which in truth was very leisurely, seemed to astound her. In her eyes, we were a pair of glacial prodigies, cold, proud, and preternatural.
CHAPTER 27
