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Updated: June 26, 2025
It is scarcely necessary to notice that the ridicule directed against such characters as Monsieur Jourdain properly applies, not to their having made their fortunes, if by honest means, but to their being ambitious to distinguish themselves by qualities inconsistent with their age, habits of thinking, and previous manners.
Jourdain has shown in a recent monograph, Maupertuis enunciated it incorrectly without realising its true import, and a far more accurate and scientific statement of it was given, within a few months, by Euler.
Surely we all know men of this kind, and the consternation comparable only to that of M. Jourdain under the impromptu carte-and-tierce of his servant-maid which their sturdy if informal dialectic will often spread among many kinds of "learned societies." But such men are certainly not of the class which Scott supposed to have been ridiculed in the character of Walter Shandy.
Monsieur Jourdain, in Moliere's comedy, who expressed such surprise at finding that he had been talking prose for forty years without knowing it, was no more amazed than would Mere Mouchard have been had you announced to her that she was a logician; or that her husband's daily occupations in the bright little court-yard were the result of a system. Yet both facts were true.
And goodness knows I wouldn't like that." "Your mother didn't like your marrying Papa." "You surely don't compare Maurice Jourdain with your father?" "He's faithful. Papa was faithful. I'm faithful too." "Faithful! To a horrid man like that!" "He isn't horrid. He's kind and clever and good. He's brave, like Mark. He'd have been a soldier if he hadn't had to help his mother. And he's honourable.
Her face had left off being reproachful and disapproving. It had got back the tender, adorable look it used to have when you were little. She hated Maurice Jourdain, yet you felt that in some queer way she loved you because of him. You loved her more because of Maurice Jourdain. The engagement happened suddenly at the end of August.
At night, when she lay in bed in the strange room, the Essex fields began to haunt her; the five trees, the little flying trees, low down, low down; the straight, narrow paths through the corn, where she walked with Mark, with Jimmy, with Mr. Jourdain; Mr. Jourdain, standing in the path and saying: "Talk to me. I'm alive. I'm here. I'll listen."
Papa and Uncle Victor were different; and Aunt Charlotte and Aunt Lavvy. Papa had married and handed it on; he hadn't cared. Uncle Victor hadn't married; he had cared too much; he had been afraid. And Maurice Jourdain and Lindley Vickers had been afraid; everybody who knew about Aunt Charlotte would be afraid, and if they didn't know you would have to tell them, supposing
"I will even go so far as Your Excellency, which is, I believe, one of his adopted titles." "Not now but that is no matter; if you could even slide in a My Lord or two, our business would be done at once." "Be satisfied! since there are upstart ministers as well as City-turned gentlemen, I will remember Moliere's M. Jourdain, and feed full the gluttonous vanity of your friend."
Look at the others: the ones that hadn't come back and the ones that had. Jimmy Ponsonby, Harry Craven, Mr. Sutcliffe. And Maurice Jourdain and Lindley Vickers. If Maurice Jourdain had never come back she would always have seen him standing in the cornfield.
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