United States or Jamaica ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It had totally escaped me that I, a bashful Englishman of twenty-one, nervously sensitive to ridicule and gifted by nature with but little of the spirit of social defiance, must in broad daylight make my appearance in the streets of Paris, accompanied by a bonnetless grisette! What should I do, if I met Dr. Chéron? or Madame de Courcelles? or, worse than all, Madame de Marignan?
Chéron shall see me before nine this morning. I'll call on Dalrymple at luncheon time; at three, I must get back for the afternoon lecture; and in the evening in the evening, by Jove! Madame de Marignan must be content with her adorable Delaroche, for the deuce a bit of her humble servant will she ever see again!"
With this I left him, somewhat relieved to find that I had escaped all cross-examination on the score of Madame Marignan. "De Caylus!" I again repeated to myself, as I took my rapid way to the Hotel Dieu. "De Caylus! why, surely, it must have been that evening at Madame de Courcelles'...."
He hadn't "amused" her, no, in quite the same way as in the Rue de Marignan time it had then been he who for the most part took frequent turns, emphatic, explosive, elocutionary, over that wonderful waxed parquet while she laughed as for the young perversity of him from the depths of the second, the matching bergère.
In short, my cavaliere servente must be my shadow." "Then, like your shadow, Madame," said I, "his place is ever at your feet, and that is all I desire!" Madame de Marignan laughed outright, and showed the loveliest little double row of pearls in all the world. "Admirable!" said she. "Quite an elegant compliment, and worthy of an accomplished lady-killer! Allons! you are a promising scholar."
When I arrested Lanscot, the poor servant in the Rue Marignan, his first words were: 'Come on, my account is good. The morning that Papa Tabaret and I took the Viscount de Commarin as he was getting out of bed, on the accusation of having murdered the widow Lerouge, he cried: 'I am lost. Yet neither of them were guilty; but both of them, the viscount and the valet, equal before the terror of a possible mistake of justice, and running over in their thoughts the charges which would be brought against them, had a moment of overwhelming discouragement."
To send me in search of a footstool, to make me hold her fan, to overwhelm me with questions and bewilder me with a thousand coquetries, were the immediate proceedings of Madame de Marignan.
Madame de Marignan nodded approvingly, and went on telling off my duties, one by one, upon her pretty fingers. "You will have to accompany me to the Opera at least twice a week, on which occasions you will bring me a bouquet camellias being my favorite flowers." "Were they the flowers that bloom but once in a century," said I, with more enthusiasm than sense, "they should be yours!"
He was the identical bird which was brought from Marignan to Prince Maurice, governor of the Brazils, and whose pertinent answers to many silly questions are recorded in the pages of the greatest of English philosophers.
"Everye white will have its blacke, And everye sweet its sowere." Old Ballad. Neither the example of Oscar Dalrymple nor the broadcloth of the great Michaud, achieved half so much for my education as did the apprenticeship I was destined to serve to Madame de Marignan.
Word Of The Day