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The familiar tutoiement, the Christian name these, perhaps, he had a right to use; but nothing could justify the contempt of his tone. It reminded me disagreeably of the ugliness I had nigh forgotten. I felt Ingeborg's arm tremble in mine. "'Yes, it is I, Herr Larson, she said, with her wonted gentleness, and almost apologetically.
'You were walking very gently.* * From this point in the original Serge and Albine thee and thou one another; but although this tutoiement has some bearing on the development of the story, it was impossible to preserve it in an English translation. His voice enchanted her. She went up to his bed and crouched beside it to bring her face on a level with his own.
"H-you young kitten!" said the old man in a growling voice, and with the teased, half laugh of aged vanity as he bent a baffled scrutiny at the back-turned face of an ideal Indian Queen. It was not merely the tutoiement that struck him as saucy, but the further familiarity of using the slave dialect. His French was unprovincial.
Still, in his relation as compatriot, Graslin never disdained to talk with Sauviat when they chanced to meet. Both continued to keep up their early tutoiement, but only in their native dialect.
In France this intimacy is embodied in the delicious privilege of tutoiement. "The mystery of tutoiement!" exclaims Ernest La Jennesse in L'Holocauste: "Barriers broken down, veils drawn away, and the ease of existence!
I did not hear ... you gave me such a start!" ... But even then another extraordinary fancy flashed through his thought; and with the tutoiement of a parent to a child, with an irresistible outburst of such tenderness as almost frightened her, he cried: "Oh! merciful God! how like her! ... Tell me, darling, your name; ... tell me who you are?"
Vous savez avec quelle finesse il parlait le francais: comme il en connaissait tous les tours, comme il jouait avec ses difficultes, et meme avec ses petites gamineries. Je crois qu'il a ete heureux de pratiquer avec moi ce tutoiement, qui ne s'adapte pas a l'anglais, et qui est si francais. Je ne puis vous peindre l'etendue et la variete de nos conversations de la soiree.
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