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"There are two days it is useless to flee from the day of your death and the day when your family doesn't care for your jokes. "For a joke is an intellectual thing, And a mot is the sword of an angel king. "Good old Blake. Why do the best people always see jokes? Why does a really good one make a whole frozen crowd feel jolly and united all of a sudden?"
There was a song the soldiers sang on the sly during these months, when the king, having said he would make war, seemed loath to begin: Timide, imbécile, farouche, Jamais Louis n'avait dit mot. At last though, under those two tough old warriors, Marshal Villars and Marshal, the Duke of Berwick, the French were on the march. Marshal Villars went to Italy and the Duke of Berwick to the Rhine.
"All that there is of the most brilliant and least truthful in Europe," M. Claude de Chauxville had said to a lady earlier in the evening, apropos of the great gathering at the French Embassy, and the mot had gone the round of the room. In society a little mot will go a long way. M. le Baron de Chauxville was, moreover, a manufacturer of mots.
Père Olivier apologized for the meager fare, but we did well enough, with soup and a tin of boiled beef, breadfruit, and feis. The soup was of a red vegetable, not appetizing, and I could not make out the native name for it, hue arahi, until Grelet cried, "Ah, j'ai trouvé le mot anglais! Ponkeen, ponkeen!" It was a red pumpkin. "La soupe maigre de missionaire," murmured the priest.
He went to Holland accompanied by Hortense, who, however, did mot stay long there. The new King wanted to make himself beloved by his subjects, and as they were an entirely commercial people the best way to win their affections was not to adopt Napoleon's rigid laws against commercial intercourse with England.
"Let me interrupt you. I am so only because it is the taste of the day; but I despise the parade of military glory we have got into the habit of. I prefer the period when a mot did as much and more than a discharge of mitraille, and men's esprit and talent succeeded better than a strong sword-arm or a seat on horseback. There were gentlemen in France once, my dear Burke. Ay, parbleu! and ladies too, not marchionesses of the drum-head nor countesses of the bivouac, but women in whom birth heightened beauty, whose loveliness had the added charm of high descent beaming from their bright eyes and sitting throned on their lofty brows; before whom our mustached marshals had stood trembling and ashamed, these men who lounge so much at ease in the salons of the Tuileries! Let me help you to this salmi; it is
‘I cannot,’ says our talented correspondent in conclusion, ‘I cannot close my account of these gigantic researches and sublime and noble triumphs without repeating a bon mot of Professor Woodensconce’s, which shows how the greatest minds may occasionally unbend when truth can be presented to listening ears, clothed in an attractive and playful form.
Despite its grotesque exaggeration, the mot contains the kernel of a dignified truth: that material things are of secondary importance on all social occasions worthy of the name. The most expensive entertainment given by any one should be merely an incidental illustration of his already recognized financial means.
"I must leave behind me the remembrance of a bon mot, or I shall be forgotten." And I was right. In that whirlpool, the capital of France, everything sinks but wit: that is always on the surface; and we must cling to it with a firm grasp, if we would not go down to "the deep oblivion." WHAT a singular scene was that private supper with the Regent of France and his roues!
An old man of about seventy, of a sharp, shrewd, yet polished and courtly expression of countenance, of a great gayety of manner, which was now and then rather displeasingly contrasted by an abrupt affectation of dignity, that, however, rarely lasted above a minute, and never withstood the shock of a /bon mot/, was the first person who accosted us.
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