you have never learned a single thing since the day when you first came to Paris, either about ladies’ clothes or about how to pronounce words without making silly blunders.” And this reproach was particularly stupid, for those French words which We are so proud of pronouncing accurately are themselves only blunders made by the Gallic lips which mispronounced Latin or Saxon, our language being merely a defective pronunciation of several others. The genius of language in a living state, the future and past of French, that is what ought to have interested me in Françoise’s mistakes. Her
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