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Alcott was admirable; but he sometimes brought manuscript poetry with him, the dear child of his own Muse, and a guest more unwelcome than the enfant terrible of the drawing-room. There was one particularly long poem which he had read aloud to my mother and father; a seemingly harmless thing, from which they never recovered.
Madame Novikoff, however, records his discomfiture at the query of a certain Lady E-, who, when all London was ringing with his first Crimean volumes, asked him if he were not an admirer of Louis Napoleon. "Le pauvre Kinglake, decontenance, repondit tout bas intimide comme un enfant qu'on met dates le coin: Oui non pas precisement." He had no knowledge of or liking for music.
"It never struck me in that light before," said Mr. Heard. "No? Our reverence for inspired idiots: has it never struck you? Don't you realize that we are still in the stage of that ENFANT TERRIBLE of Christianity, Paul of Tarsus, and his gift of tongues? In the stage of these Russians here, with their decayed Messiah? What do you think of them?" "I must say they look pretty, all bathing together.
In two successive winters his tragedies of Zayre, Alzire, Zulime, and his sentimental comedy of the Enfant Prodigue, were played at the theatre of Monrepos. Voltaire represented the characters best adapted to his years, Lusignan, Alvarez, Benassar, Euphemon.
So, instead of teaching the son to love and revere his father, the Frenchman shrugged his shoulders when the boy broke into some unfilial complaint, and at most said, "Mais, cher enfant, ton pere est Anglais, c'est tout dire."
Chandos was engaged in a breathless and altogether desperate struggle with the slow but inevitable and appalling Nemesis of a body and character that would not harmonize. If her figure grew stout, what was to become of her charm as an 'enfant gate'? Her host not only perceived, but apparently derived great enjoyment out of the drama of this contest.
The little girl at the other end of the bench rolled her big eyes toward them with indifference, continuing to croon to her doll: "Dors, mon enfant; dors, dors; ta mère est allée au bal.... Dors, mon enfant, dors; ta mère est au théâtre.... Tais-toi; tais-toi; ta mère dîne au restaurant.... Dors, ma chérie, dors."
She stopped with a graceful pretense of dreading his judgment, although she knew that she had been talking well, and read nothing but admiration in his very expressive face. "But all this means, you extraordinary young person, that you're not in the least an enfant du siècle!" he cried.
His garrulity was irresistible and made Domini feel as if she were sitting with a child. Perhaps he caught her feeling, for he added: "The desert has made me an enfant terrible, I fear. What have you there?" His eyes had been attracted by the flask of liqueur, to which Domini was stretching out her hand with the intention of giving him some. "I don't know."
"Go, mon enfant," said Madame von Marwitz, turning the steady glance on her. "Go. Nobody here, as your husband truly says, is thinking of me. I shall be quite untroubled." Still with her look of preoccupation Karen moved away.
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