n an age so candidly unconscious of
them is to feel how much history we have seen unrolled. There were times
when he but paced up and down and round the long table--I see him as
never seated, but always on the move, a weary Wandering Jew of the
_classe_; but in particular I hear him recite to us the combat with the
Moors from Le Cid and show us how Talma, describing it, seemed to crouch
down on his haunches in order to spring up again terrifically to the
height of "Nous nous levons alors!" which M. Bonnefons rendered as if on
the carpet there fifty men at least had leaped to their feet. But he
threw off these broken lights with a quick relapse to indifference; he
didn't like the Anglo-Saxon--of the children of Albion at least his view
was low; on his American specimens he had, I observed, more mercy; and
this imperfection of sympathy (the question of Waterloo apart) rested,
it was impossible not to feel, on his so resenting the dishonour
suffered at our hands by his beautiful tongue, to which, as the great
field of elocution, he was patriotically devoted. I think he fairly
loathed our closed English vowels and confused consonants, our
destitution of sounds that he recognised as sounds; though why in this
connection he put up best with our own compatriots, embroiled at that
time often in even stranger vocables than now, is more than I can say. I
think that would be explained perhaps by his feeling in them as an old
equalitarian certain accessibilities _quand meme_. Besides, we of the
younger persuasion at least must have done his ear less violence than
those earnest ladies from beyond the sea and than those young Englishmen
qualifying for examinations and careers who flocked with us both to the
plausibly spread and the severely disgarnished table, and on whose part
I seem to see it again an effort of anguish to "pick up" the happy idiom
that we had unconsciously acquired. French, in the fine old formula of
those days, so much diffused, "was the language of the family"; but I
think it must have appeared to these students in general a family of
which the youngest members were but scantly kept in their place. We
piped with a greater facility and to a richer meed of recognition; which
sounds as if we might have become, in these strange collocations, fairly
offensive little prigs. That was none the less not the case, for there
were, oddly enough, a few French boys as well, to whom on the lingual or
the "family" ground, we felt