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You are my elder and my superior: tell me if I am not right. He was a quiet-mannered old fellow, and patted me with three fingers on the back. 'C'est bien, mon enfant, says he, and returned to his committee. Goguelat was no more accommodating than myself. 'I do not like apologies nor those that make them, was his only answer. And there remained nothing but to arrange the details of the meeting.
"Sometimes we go away into the ball-room and dance," she said, "that is when papa is losing; he says, 'Madelon, mon enfant, I see we shall do nothing here to-night, let us go and dance. But sometimes he does nothing but win, and then we stop till the table closes, and he makes a great deal of money. Do you ever make money in that way, Monsieur?" she added naïvely.
But arms caught me from behind, as I would have sunk to the floor with the roar of another explosion in my ears, each brick of the house quivering on another. A kind Belgian voice was soothing me: "Pauvre enfant!" and hands, strong, though womanly, would have pulled me away from the window to lay me down on some unoccupied bunk, if I had not struggled to keep my place. "No no!" I stammered.
This night, I say, had been as the others. Perhaps some day the small boy of the place will be grown up. He is a real enfant terrible. It is his pleasure to tutoyer the guests, to amuse himself by pretending to serve them, only to bring the wrong dishes, or none at all. If you call to him he is deaf.
"And why do you not write to him at once, mon enfant?" "I cannot," was all Madelon's answer, nor could Jeanne-Marie ever extract any further explanation on that point.
"But I have a copy." "You? Where?" "In my heart, mon cher enfant. Why should I not remember the great poet's words? 'Dearest brother-in-arms Never have I found in any other but you so much passion united with so much clairvoyance in action. You have truly the divine right of autocracy. I only feel a humble fly...." She paused and smiled at him. "You see."
He said he would give a benediction, bring over the Enfant Jésus, and make a small address to the children.
'All right, he answers, 'I shall probably look in during the morning. Ta ta. Mabel Seaton is a great favourite. She is not what one would call pretty, but she possesses a bright, cheery face, which is reflected in miniature in her son Teddy, who is as his uncle says rather the 'enfant terrible! but do not say so before his mother, or her wrath would be dire.
I'm afraid I was what the French call un enfant terrible in the vernacular, an awful child! full of irresistible life and impulsive will; living fully in the present, looking neither before nor after; as ready to execute as to conceive; full of imagination a faculty too often thwarted and warped by the fears of parents and friends that it means insincerity and falsehood, when it is in reality but the spontaneous exercise of faculties as yet unknown even to the possessor, and misunderstood by those so-called trainers of infancy.
We were silent also, as the picture of that transfigured daughter of the house flitted across our own mental vision. "The village?" suddenly broke in the old mere. "Dieu de Dieu! that reminds me. I must go, my children, I must go. Loisette is waiting; la pauvre enfant perhaps suffering too how do I know? And here am I, playing, like a lazy clout! Did you know she had had un nini this morning?
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