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She fixed her eyes for a while on this ornament, and then she looked at the glowing bed of anthracite coal in the grate. "Did you ever see anything so hideous as that fire?" she demanded. "Did you ever see anything so so affreux as as everything?"
Might have been designed by Victor Hugo; it's in his style. Scene, Norway midnight. Mysterious maiden steals out of a cave and glides away in a boat over the water; man, the hero, goes into cave, finds a stone coffin, says 'Qu'est-ce que c'est? Dieu! C'est la mort! Spectacle affreux!
The Marquise du Deffand was perhaps the most typical representative of that phase of civilisation which came into existence in Western Europe during the early years of the eighteenth century, and reached its most concentrated and characteristic form about the year 1750 in the drawing-rooms of Paris. She was supremely a woman of her age; but it is important to notice that her age was the first, and not the second, half of the eighteenth century: it was the age of the Regent Orleans, Fontenelle, and the young Voltaire; not that of Rousseau, the 'Encyclopaedia, and the Patriarch of Ferney. It is true that her letters to Walpole, to which her fame is mainly due, were written between 1766 and 1780; but they are the letters of an old woman, and they bear upon every page of them the traces of a mind to which the whole movement of contemporary life was profoundly distasteful. The new forces to which the eighteenth century gave birth in thought, in art, in sentiment, in action which for us form its peculiar interest and its peculiar glory were anathema to Madame du Deffand. In her letters to Walpole, whenever she compares the present with the past her bitterness becomes extreme. 'J'ai eu autrefois, she writes in 1778, 'des plaisirs indicibles aux opéras de Quinault et de Lulli, et au jeu de Thévenart et de la Lemaur. Pour aujourd'hui, tout me paraît détestable: acteurs, auteurs, musiciens, beaux esprits, philosophes, tout est de mauvais goût, tout est affreux, affreux. That great movement towards intellectual and political emancipation which centred in the 'Encyclopaedia' and the Philosophes was the object of her particular detestation. She saw Diderot once and that was enough for both of them. She could never understand why it was that M. de Voltaire would persist in wasting his talent for writing over such a dreary subject as religion. Turgot, she confessed, was an honest man, but he was also a 'sot animal. His dismissal from office that fatal act, which made the French Revolution inevitable delighted her: she concealed her feelings from Walpole, who admired him, but she was outspoken enough to the Duchesse de Choiseul. 'Le renvoi du Turgot me plaît extrêmement, she wrote; 'tout me paraît en bon train. And then she added, more prophetically than she knew, 'Mais, assurément, nous n'en resterons pas l
He was as assiduous behind the scenes of the opera as any journalist, or any young dandy of twenty years. He "ranged himself," as the French phrase is, shortly before his marriage, just like any other young bachelor: took leave of Phryne and Aspasie in the coulisses, and proposed to devote himself henceforth to his charming young wife. The affreux catastrophe of July arrived.
"It reminds me of a verse I read," and drawing a small volume from his pocket he turned the pages quickly. "Ah, here it is," and he marked some lines with a pencil. "There!" Alice took the volume and began to read in a low voice: "Je n'aimais qu'elle au monde, et vivre un jour sans elle Me semblait un destin plus affreux que la mort.
I'm all right, thank you." "Ah! but yes," he retorted "you cannote deceives me. You are pallide; you take walks on feet this detestable day. Mon Dieu! votre climat c'est affreux! I knows ver wells, Meestaire Lorton, dat somesings ees ze mattaire!" "But, I'm quite well, I tell you," said I. "Quaite well en physique, bon: quaite well, here?" tapping his chest expressively the while "non!
"It is all the same. Ils sont tous des monstres affreux." "Tst! Tst! Tst!" The voice of Jacques came up from the garden. "What is it?" "Tst! Tst!" They were silent, and heard in the distance faintly a sound of drumming and of native music. "I must go! I must hear, see!" The composer cried out. "Come with me, my Susan, and you, Max, old person!"
"He says it must have been a 'fearsome sicht," repeated Lorimer, with even a stronger accent than Sanby's own, "which, mon cher Pierre, means all the horrors in your language; affreux, epouvantable, navrant anything you like, that is sufficiently terrible." "Mais, point du tout!" cried Duprez energetically. "It was charming! It made us laugh at death so much better than to cry!
Comptez sur moi. Juste ciel, mais c'est affreux l'escalier." But he worked while he poured out this medley, and Iris was standing on level ground ere he made an end. He was a handsome youngster, evidently an officer, and his eyes dwelt on the girl's face with no lack of animation as he led her into a cave which seemed to have been excavated from the inner side of a small crater.
The latter had just returned from town, where he had been to see the governor upon a rather unpleasant matter for himself, upon which he kept a tacit silence, but was very voluble about everything else. Sipiagin sat on him somewhat when he went a little too far, but laughed a good deal at his anecdotes and bon mots, although he thought qu'il est un affreux reactionnaire.
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