did previous limited
exhibitions; even those, for that matter, coming back to me in the
ancient person of M. Charriau--I guess at the writing of his name--whom
I work in but confusedly as a professional visitor, a subject gaped at
across a gulf of fear, in one of our huddled schools; all the more that
I perfectly evoke him as resembling, with a difference or two, the
portraits of the aged Voltaire, and that he had, fiddle in hand and
_jarret tendu_, incited the young agility of our mother and aunt. Edward
Ferrero was another matter; in the prime of life, good-looking, romantic
and moustachio'd, he was suddenly to figure, on the outbreak of the
Civil War, as a General of volunteers--very much as if he had been one
of Bonaparte's improvised young marshals; in anticipation of which,
however, he wasn't at all fierce or superior, to my remembrance, but
most kind to sprawling youth, in a charming man of the world fashion and
as if _we_ wanted but a touch to become also men of the world.
Remarkably good-looking, as I say, by the measure of that period, and
extraordinarily agile--he could so gracefully leap and bound that his
bounding into the military saddle, such occasion offering, had all the
felicity, and only wanted the pink fleshings, of the circus--he was
still more admired by the mothers, with whom he had to my eyes a most
elegant relation, than by the pupils; among all of whom, at the frequent
and delightful soirees, he caused trays laden with lucent syrups
repeatedly to circulate. The scale of these entertainments, as I figured
it, and the florid frescoes, just damp though they were with newness,
and the free lemonade, and the freedom of remark, equally great, with
the mothers, were the lavish note in him--just as the fact that he never
himself fiddled, but was followed, over the shining parquet, by
attendant fiddlers, represented doubtless a shadow the less on his later
dignity, so far as that dignity was compassed. Dignity marked in full
measure even at the time the presence of his sister Madame Dubreuil, a
handsome authoritative person who instructed us equally, in fact
preponderantly, and who, though comparatively not sympathetic, so
engaged, physiognomically, my wondering interest, that I hear to this
hour her shrill Franco-American accent: "Don't look at _me_, little
boy--look at my feet." I see them now, these somewhat fat members,
beneath the uplifted skirt, encased in "bronzed" slippers, without heels
but atta