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A few emigrants very few in numbers, and without political importance resided near him; one of them was the Marquis de Thumery, whose name, mispronounced with a German accent, gave rise to the error which supposed the presence of Dumouriez at Ettenheim. The first movement of the Duc d'Enghien had been to defend himself. "Are you compromised?" asked a German officer who was at his house.
The interview had greatly excited him, and his speech seemed even more halting and labored than before. Many of his words were mispronounced and separated by long pauses; but his manner was marvelously expressive, and often a peculiar turn of the eye or movement of the hand made his meaning clear when I was in doubt about his words.
He avoided every recognised phrase in the language and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance, but whim. "Sesquippledan," he would say. "Sesquippledan verboojuice." "Eh?" said Platt. "Eloquent Rapsodooce." "Where?" asked Platt. "In the warehouse, O' Man. All among the table-cloths and blankets. Carlyle. He's reading aloud. Doing the High Froth. Spuming!
One amusing result of the fact that we have so many adaptations from the French is that not only are the names abominably mispronounced which can hardly be avoided but that the efforts at representing the foreign feeding as a rule are all wrong.
But the poor child had to remain naked throughout the ceremony. It was interminable. The priest stammered over the Latin words and mispronounced them horribly. He walked slowly and with a ponderous tread. His white surplice chilled my heart.
The same may be said of numberless words in the Corean language which are merely corruptions or mispronounced Chinese words.
As soon as the new regulation I had made, relative to passports, was known, none but pretended Frenchmen, who in a gibberish the most mispronounced, called themselves Provencals, Picards, or Burgundians, came to demand them. My ear being very fine, I was not thus made a dupe, and I am almost persuaded that not a single Italian ever cheated me of my sequin, and that not one Frenchman ever paid it.
She asked questions that riddled the honest knight in armour below, and probed ever nearer to the hateful secret of the shop and his normal servitude. And when he made a flourish and mispronounced a word a thoughtful shade passed like the shadow of a cloud across her face. "Boom!" came the sound of a gong. "Lordy!" cried the girl and flashed a pair of brown legs at him and was gone.
At first she was merely puzzled, and smiled, and then it occurred to her that it was doubtless the barbarous way he pronounced au revoir, and the smile gave place to an expression of slight nausea. As Hunt well knew, her pet aversion was people who lugged mispronounced French phrases into their conversation under the impression that they imparted a piquant and graceful effect.
As he had learnt almost entirely by ear, and any word mispronounced had had to be gone over, again and again, until Don Diaz was perfectly satisfied, his accent was excellent; and the professor had told him, a few days before the breaking out of the war, that in another month or two he should discontinue his lessons.
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