as might
naturally proceed, I think I felt, from a mightier race; they spoke of
poor old Bonnefons, they spoke of our good Fezandie himself, they spoke
more or less of everyone within view, as beggars and beasts, and I
remember to have heard on their lips no qualification of any dish served
to us at dejeuner (and still more at the later meal, of which my
brothers and I didn't partake) but as rotten. These were expressions,
absent from our domestic, our American air either of fonder
discriminations or vaguer estimates, which fairly extended for me the
range of intellectual, or at least of social resource; and as the
general tone of them to-day comes back to me it floods somehow with
light the image of the fine old insular confidence (so intellectually
unregenerate then that such a name scarce covers it, though inward
stirrings and the growth of a _comparative_ sense of things have now
begun unnaturally to agitate and disfigure it,) in which the general
outward concussion of the English "abroad" with the fact of being abroad
took place. The Fezandie young men were as much abroad as might be, and
yet figured to me--largely by the upsetting force of that confidence,
all but physically exercised--as the finest, handsomest, knowingest
creatures; so that when I met them of an afternoon descending the
Champs-Elysees with fine long strides and in the costume of the period,
for which we can always refer to contemporary numbers of "Punch," the
fact that I was for the most part walking sedately either with my mother
or my aunt, or even with my sister and her governess, caused the spark
of my vision that they were armed for conquest, or at the least for
adventure, more expansively to glow. I am not sure whether as a general
thing they honoured me at such instants with a sign of recognition; but
I recover in especial the sense of an evening hour during which I had
accompanied my mother to the Hotel Meurice, where one of the New York
cousins aforementioned, daughter of one of the Albany uncles--that is of
the Rhinebeck member of the group--had perched for a time, so
incongruously, one already seemed to feel, after the sorriest stroke of
fate. I see again the gaslit glare of the Rue de Rivoli in the spring or
the autumn evening (I forget which, for our year of the Rue d'Angouleme
had been followed by a migration to the Rue Montaigne, with a period, or
rather with two periods, of Boulogne-sur-mer interwoven, and we might
have made our b