nd up indeed with two foreign recruits, small brown snappy
Mademoiselle Delavigne, who plied us with the French tongue at home and
who had been introduced to us as the niece--or could it have been the
grandniece?--of the celebrated Casimir, and a large Russian lady in an
extraordinarily short cape (I like to recall the fashion of short capes)
of the same stuff as her dress, and Merovingian sidebraids that seemed
to require the royal crown of Fredegonde or Brunehaut to complete their
effect. This final and aggravational representative of the compromising
sex looms to my mind's eye, I should add, but as the creature of an
hour, in spite of her having been domiciled with us; whereas I think of
Mademoiselle Delavigne as flitting in and out on quick, fine, more or
less cloth-shod feet of exemplary neatness, the flat-soled feet of Louis
Philippe and of the female figures in those volumes of Gavarni then
actual, then contemporaneous, which were kept in a piece of furniture
that stood between the front-parlour windows in Fourteenth Street,
together with a set of Beranger enriched by steel engravings to the
strange imagery of which I so wonderingly responded that all other art
of illustration, ever since, has been for me comparatively weak and
cold. These volumes and the tall entrancing folios of Nash's
lithographed Mansions of England in the Olden Time formed a store
lending itself particularly to distribution on the drawingroom carpet,
with concomitant pressure to the same surface of the small student's
stomach and relieving agitation of his backward heels. I make out that
it had decidedly been given to Mlle. Delavigne to represent to my first
perception personal France; she was, besides not being at all pink or
shy, oval and fluent and mistress somehow of the step--the step of
levity that involved a whisk of her short skirts; there she was, to the
life, on the page of Gavarni, attesting its reality, and there again did
that page in return (I speak not of course of the unplumbed depths of
the appended text) attest her own felicity. I was later on to feel--that
is I was to learn--how many impressions and appearances, how large a
sense of things, her type and tone prefigured. The evanescence of the
large Russian lady, whom I think of as rather rank, I can't express it
otherwise, may have been owing to some question of the purity of her
accent in French; it was one of her attributes and her grounds of appeal
to us that she had come