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The shave and the wash completed I felt considerably refreshed. "L'americain en bas!" It was the Black Holster. I carefully adjusted my tunic and obeyed him. The Directeur and the Surveillant were in consultation when I entered the latter's office. Apollyon, seated at a desk, surveyed me very fiercely.
A planton was standing in The Enormous Room, a planton roaring and cursing and crying, "Hurry, those who are going to go." The Black Holster was roaring: "Allez, nom de Dieu, l'americain!" I went down the room with B. and Pete, and shook hands with both at the door. The other partis, alias The Trick Raincoat and The Fighting Sheeney, were already on the way downstairs.
Simultaneously with my arrival at the summit of dirtiness by the calendar, as I guess, December the twenty-first came the Black Holster into The Enormous Room and with an excited and angry mien proclaimed loudly: "L'americain! Allez chez le Directeur. De suite." I protested mildly that I was dirty. "N'importe.
I marched the length of the room. The Enormous Room is filled with a new and beautiful darkness, the darkness of the snow outside, falling and falling and falling with the silent and actual gesture which has touched the soundless country of my mind as a child touches a toy it loves.... Through the locked door I heard a nervous whisper: "Dis a l'americain que je veux parler avec lui."
L'Américain farouche est un monstre sauvage Qui mord en frémissant le frein de l'esclavage ... Tout pouvoir, en un mot, périt par l'indulgence, Et la sévérité produit l'obéissance. Such were the cruel maxims of his government maxims which he was only too ready to put into practice.
Calvert bent over her hand he thought to himself that she might have sat for a portrait of Aurora's self, so fresh and beautiful did she look. "I am glad you are here, Monsieur l'Americain, on this great day for France, one of the most momentous, one of the happiest in all her history. You see I have not forgotten your fondness for history!" and she shot him an amused glance.
Max O'Rell, on the other hand, writes: "L'habitant du Nord-est des Etats Unis, le Yankee, diffère autant de l'Americain de l'Ouest et du Midi que l'Anglais diffère de l'Allemand ou de l'Espagnol." On this point I find myself far more in accord with the French than with the British observer, though, perhaps, M. Blouët rather overstates his case.
Also, in that somewhat limited period of time, I gained all sorts of highly enlightening information concerning the lives, habits and likes of half a dozen of as fine companions as it has ever been my luck to meet or, so far as I can now imagine, ever will be. In prison one learns several million things if one is l'americain from Mass-a-chu-setts.
"You are a Republic now, like our own, and of course my sympathies are wholly with you." "Vive la Republique! Vive l'Americain!" the students shouted. Cuthbert Hartington shrugged his shoulders. "We were just starting for a stroll to the walls to see how they are getting on with the work of demolition. Are any of you disposed to go with us?"
Finally he gradually uttered, with a thick accent, the following extremely impressive dictum: "C'est l'americain." I felt much pleased, and said "Oui, j'suis americain, Monsieur." He rolled half over backwards in his creaking chair with wonderment at such an unexpected retort.
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