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Has Madame de Cambis sung to you "Sans dépit, sans légèreté?" Has Lord Cholmondeley delivered my pacquet? I hear I have hopes of Madame d'Olonne. Gout or no gout, I shall be little in town till after Christmas. My elbow makes me bless myself that I am not in Paris. Old age is no such uncomfortable thing, if one gives oneself up to it with a good grace, and don't drag it about
In this the French must be allowed to excel all people in the world: they have 'un certain entregent, un enjouement, un aimable legerete dans la conversation, une politesse aisee et naturelle, qui paroit ne leur rien couter', which give society all its charms.
Raymond entreated his wife to atone for her involuntary legereté by submitting with a good grace to the usages of her adopted country; and he seemed to regard the remaining months of the summer as hardly long enough for this act of expiation. Still, even these conditions were not permanent, and the discipline of the last years had trained Undine to wait and dissemble.
It consists in it is advisable to give rule and example together, wherever it is possible breaking up one phrase in order to glue in another. Nor is it merely out of laziness that they write thus. They do it out of stupidity; they think there is a charming légèreté about it; that it gives life to what they say. No doubt there are a few rare cases where such a form of sentence may be pardonable.
The French say that a certain heaviness in our nature always prevents us from hitting the precise tact and tone necessary for it; and they may be right, to a certain extent, but I must declare that the much-belauded légèreté and lightsomeness of French Society puts me out of temper, and makes me feel stupid and uncomfortable, and that I cannot look upon those bon mots and calembours of theirs, which are continually being fired off in all directions, as coming under the class of that 'Society wit' which gives out constantly fresh sparks of new life of conversation.
"'La légèreté
"Gesticulating I'll warrant!" declared their hostess. "They mimic as for the deaf, they emphasise as for the blind. Mrs. Delamere is doubtless an epitome of all the virtues, but I never heard of her. You travel too much," Madame Carré went on; "that's very amusing, but the way to study is to stay at home, to shut yourself up and hammer at your scales." Mrs. Rooth complained that they had no home to stay at; in reply to which the old actress exclaimed: "Oh you English, you're d'une légèreté
In this the French must be allowed to excel all people in the world: they have 'un certain entregent, un enjouement, un aimable legerete dans la conversation, une politesse aisee et naturelle, qui paroit ne leur rien couter', which give society all its charms.
Permit me: what you want chiefly in conversation in every thing, is a certain degree of of you have no English word lightness." "Legerete, perhaps you mean," said Ormond. "Precisely. I forgot you understood French so well. Legerete untranslatable! You seize my idea."
She remembered his conversation with her brother and her brother's impression; she thought of the unloverlike dread of ague in Emily's moonlight walk; she recalled the many occasions when she had thought him remiss, and she could not but acquit him of any designed flirtation, any dangerous tenderness, or what Mdlle. Belmarche would call legerete.
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