United States or Marshall Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
'Well, with regard to the Countess of Lyndon, your manner of winning her is quite en l'air at present to me; nor can I advise day by day, as I would I could, according to circumstances as they arise. But your general scheme should be this. I recollect several passages in her letters bitterly deploring her fate in being united to one so unworthy of her.
At length the time had come for us to part, and Blanche, the egregious Blanche, shed real tears as she took her leave of me. "Tu etais bon enfant" she said with a sob. "Je te croyais bete et tu en avais l'air, but it suited you." Then, having given me a final handshake, she exclaimed, "Attends!"; whereafter, running into her boudoir, she brought me thence two thousand-franc notes.
Etre simple, c'est le comble de l'art. Ca vous donne," he added, with clasped hands and a step backward, "ca vous donne tout a fait l'air d'une dame de Nattier." Madame took the hand-glass, and did not deny that she was eblouissante. If madame, suggested Monsieur Cadron, had but a little dress a la Marie Antoinette?
But you know a phrase we have in French, 'l'air pesant'; I don't think there's anything in English for it; il avait l'air pesant, Cezanne, if you know what I mean. "I should work, I should not waste my time," the Count would say almost weepingly. "But it's no use, my things aren't here. And I'm getting old too; couldn't concentrate in this stinking hole of a place, you know."
'I did not think I was so stupid, said Mysie, 'but I heard Louise tell mademoiselle that I was trop bourgeoise, and mademoiselle answered that I was plutot petite paysanne, and would never have l'air de distinction. 'Abominable impertinence! cried Gillian.
"Mais, Monsieur Andre, que vous avez l'air etrange; how funny you look dressed like that." The concierge was smiling at him from her cubbyhole beside the stairs. She sat knitting with a black shawl round her head, a tiny old woman with a hooked bird-like nose and eyes sunk in depressions full of little wrinkles, like a monkey's eyes.
Within, a group of peasants was gathered about the inn table. There were some young girls seated among the blouses; one of them, for the hour that we had sat waiting for Fend l'Air to be captured and harnessed, had been singing songs of questionable taste in a voice of such contralto sweetness as to have touched the heart of a bishop.
He told me, 'que vous parliez l'Allemand comme un Allemand; que vous saviez le droit public de l'empire parfaitement bien; que vous aviez le gout sur, et des connoissances fort etendues'. I told him that I knew all this very well; but that I wanted to know whether you had l'air, les manieres, les attentions, en fin le brillant d'un honnete homme': his answer was, 'Mais oui en verite, c'est fort bien'. This, you see, is but cold in comparison of what I do wish, and of what you ought to wish.
Our poor, battered aristocracy the Radicals have kicked away all its natural supports, and left it dans l'air; but it can still teach manners and the art to please. The undergraduates, however, seem shy of her." For although among the groups of men, who stood huddled together mostly at the back of the room, many eyes were turned upon the newcomer, no one among them approached her.
She called him bete! and grand bete! by turns, butor! ane! and grand butor! nigaud! and grand nigaud! pronounced him to be "Un homme qui ne dit rien d'ailleurs un homme qui n'a pas l'air comme il faut un homme, enfin, qui n'est pas presentable meme en fait de mari." Dora looked unutterable things; but this was not unusual with her.
Word Of The Day