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Frederic Harrison wants to be doing business, and he complains that the man of culture stops him with a "turn for small fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and indecision in action." Of what use is culture, he asks, except for "a critic of new books or a professor of belles lettres?"
We chatted on, laughed, listened to stories and colony anecdotes that carried us back to the last war, and heard a great many eulogiums on beaux and belles, that we young people had, all our lives, considered as respectable, elderly, commonplace sort of persons. At length the hour arrived when even Mrs. Bogart herself admitted we ought to part.
"Considerably better, Miss, especially in the way of republican comfort." Miss Ring, like all belles, detested the word republican, their vocation being clearly to exclusion, and she pouted a little affectedly. "I should distrust the quality of such comfort, sir," she said, with point; "but, are the rooms at all comparable with the rooms in Apsley House, for instance?"
Brett smiled. "It would be an ignoble conclusion to the chase if the Belles Soeurs were wrecked with her valuable cargo. I most devoutly pray," he said to himself, "that the breezes and currents may combine to bring Dubois safely on shore. Then I think we can deal with him."
He had cast himself with all his resources into this enterprise, and, while his faculties remained, he was not a man to recoil from it. On the other hand, the masculine fibre of which he was made did not always withhold him from the practice of the arts of address, and the use of what Dollier de Casson styles belles paroles.
At this time there were three distinct sets or social castes at the court of France: the pious and virtuous band about the good Queen Claude; the lettered and elegant belles in the coterie of Marguerite d'Angoulême, sister of Francis I.; and the wanton and libertine young maids who formed a galaxy of youth and beauty about Louise of Savoy, and were by her used to fascinate her son and thus distract him from affairs of state.
The Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres, did not remain insensible to the glory that one of their members had acquired in the career of politics, and testified it by numerous deputations.
Our escape has been mavellous, for Napoleon's plan was to penetrate to Bruxelles, and to surprise the Duke and his staff at the ball, when surrounded by the British belles; for he had his spies to report even the hour of our pastimes, and he reckoned upon a rise of the Belgians in his favour.
Montague's initiation into Society had taken place in the winter-time, and he had yet to witness its vacation activities. When Society's belles and dames had completed a season's round of dinner-parties and dances, they were more or less near to nervous prostration, and Newport was the place which they had selected to retire to and recuperate.
"You are very good, sir," returned Aurelia; "it is my great pleasure." "That I can well believe," said Dr. Godfrey. "Have these agreeable recitations made you acquainted with the new poem on the Seasons by Mr. James Thomson?" "No," replied Mr. Belamour, "my acquaintance with the belles letters ceased nine years ago." "The descriptions have been thought extremely effective.
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