change and operate,
so many would have to happen, so much water have to flow under the
bridge, before I could give primary application to such a thought, much
more finish such a sentence.

All of which is but a way of saying that we had since the beginning of
the summer settled ourselves in Paris, and that M. Lerambert--by what
agency invoked, by what revelation vouchsafed, I quite forget--was at
this time attending us in a so-called pavilion, of middling size, that,
between the Rond-Point and the Rue du Colisee, hung, at no great height,
over the Avenue des Champs-Elysees; hung, that is, from the vantage of
its own considerable terrace, surmounted as the parapet of the latter
was with iron railings rising sufficiently to protect the place for
familiar use and covert contemplation (we ever so fondly used it,) and
yet not to the point of fencing out life. A blest little old-world
refuge it must have seemed to us, with its protuberantly-paved and
peculiarly resonant small court and idle _communs_ beside it, accessible
by a high grille where the jangle of the bell and the clatter of
response across the stones might have figured a comprehensive echo of
all old Paris. Old Paris then even there considerably lingered; I
recapture much of its presence, for that matter, within our odd relic
of a house, the property of an American southerner from whom our
parents had briefly hired it and who appeared to divide his time, poor
unadmonished gentleman of the eve of the Revolution, between Louisiana
and France. What association could have breathed more from the queer
graces and the queer incommodities alike, from the diffused glassy
polish of floor and perilous staircase, from the redundancy of mirror
and clock and ormolu vase, from the irrepressibility of the white and
gold panel, from that merciless elegance of tense red damask, above all,
which made the gilt-framed backs of sofa and chair as sumptuous, no
doubt, but as sumptuously stiff, as the brocaded walls? It was amid
these refinements that we presently resumed our studies--even explicitly
far from arduous at first, as the Champs-Elysees were perforce that year
our summer habitation and some deference was due to the place and the
season, lessons of any sort being at best an infraction of the latter.
M. Lerambert, who was spare and tightly black-coated, spectacled, pale
and prominently intellectual, who lived in the Rue Jacob with his mother
and sister, exactly as he should have