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And order and silence reigned when the Sister gave in her evidence as follows: "My name is Jacquelina L'Oiseau not Grimshaw for I never was the wife of Dr. Grimshaw. I do not like to speak further of myself, yet it is necessary, to make my testimony clear. While yet a child I was contracted to Dr. Grimshaw in a civil marriage, which was never ratified.
But Burke, whose imagination never allows even business to subside into mere prose, sustains a pitch throughout which accustoms the mind to wonder, and, while it prepares us to accompany him in his boldest flights, makes us, even when he walks, still feel that he has wings: "Meme quand l'oiseau marche, on sent qu'il a des ailes."
Not your arm, of course, but my-poor arm, which has grown so much thinner again this year." Or: "Francoise, didn't you hear that bell just now! It split my head." "No, Mme. Octave." "Ah, poor girl, your skull must be very thick; you may thank God for that. It was Maguelone come to fetch Dr. Piperaud. He came out with her at once and they went off along the Rue de l'Oiseau.
"Il ne vient pas deux fois l'oiseau bleu." Toby's lip trembled. She bit it desperately. Her look was strained. She did not attempt to speak. "It is the gift of the gods, chérie." The words came softly at her shoulder, but they pierced her. "We do not cast their gifts away. They come too seldom." She made a quick movement; it was almost convulsive, like the start of one suddenly awakened.
"A what?" exclaimed all, in a breath, "An assignation," repeated Jacko, with owl-like calmness and solemnity. "What in the name of common sense do you mean, my dear?" inquired Mrs. Waugh, while the commodore and Mary L'Oiseau looked the astonishment they did not speak. "Pray explain yourself, my love." "He says I swallowed an assignation whole!" repeated Jacquelina, with distinct emphasis.
L'Oiseau, and urged her, in the most strenuous manner, to exert her maternal influence in bringing her daughter to terms. And Mrs. L'Oiseau sent for Jacquelina, to have a talk with her. But not all her arguments, entreaties, or even tears, could prevail with the obstinate bride to relax one single degree of her unforgiving antagonism to her detested bridegroom.
Henrietta and Mrs. L'Oiseau, followed by all the household, crowded around them with water, the only restorative at hand. At length she recovered and looked up, a little bewildered, but soon memory and understanding returned and, gazing at her uncle, she suddenly threw her arms around his neck and burst into tears.
This was not the one which had been occupied by Edith. Edith's chamber had been left undisturbed and locked up by Mrs. Waugh, and was kept ever after sacred to her memory. The sojourn of Mrs. L'Oiseau and Jacquelina at Luckenough was an experiment on the part of the commodore. He did not mean to commit himself hastily, as in the case of his sudden choice of Edith as his heiress.
L'Oiseau heard of this engagement, she crossed herself, and told her beads, and vowed that the world was growing so wicked that she could no longer live in it. And she commenced preparations to retire to a convent, to which in fact she soon after went, and where in strict truth, she was likely to be much happier than her nature would permit her to be elsewhere.
To live in, Combray was a trifle depressing, like its streets, whose houses, built of the blackened stone of the country, fronted with outside steps, capped with gables which projected long shadows downwards, were so dark that one had, as soon as the sun began to go down, to draw back the curtains in the sitting-room windows; streets with the solemn names of Saints, not a few of whom figured in the history of the early lords of Combray, such as the Rue Saint-Hilaire, the Rue Saint-Jacques, in which my aunt's house stood, the Rue Sainte-Hildegarde, which ran past her railings, and the Rue du Saint-Esprit, on to which the little garden gate opened; and these Combray streets exist in so remote a quarter of my memory, painted in colours so different from those in which the world is decked for me to-day, that in fact one and all of them, and the church which towered above them in the Square, seem to me now more unsubstantial than the projections of my magic-lantern; while at times I feel that to be able to cross the Rue Saint-Hilaire again, to engage a room in the Rue de l'Oiseau, in the old hostelry of the Oiseau Flesche, from whose windows in the pavement used to rise a smell of cooking which rises still in my mind, now and then, in the same warm gusts of comfort, would be to secure a contact with the unseen world more marvellously supernatural than it would be to make Golo's acquaintance and to chat with Genevieve de Brabant.
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