establishment we then found supreme for little criss-crossed apple
tartlets and melting _babas_--young Coquelin's home life amid which we
the more acutely envied that the upward cock of his so all-important
nose testified, for my fancy, to the largest range of free familiar
sniffing. C.-B. Coquelin is personally most present to me, in the form
of that hour, by the value, as we were to learn to put it, of this nose,
the fine assurance and impudence of which fairly made it a trumpet for
promises; yet in spite of that, the very gage, as it were, of his long
career as the most interesting and many-sided comedian, or at least most
unsurpassed dramatic _diseur_ of his time, I failed to doubt that, with
the rich recesses of the parental industry for his background, his
subtlest identity was in his privilege, or perhaps even in his expertest
trick, of helping himself well.

These images, however, were but drops in the bucket of my sense of
catching character, roundabout us, as I say, at every turn and in every
aspect; character that began even, as I was pleased to think, in our own
habitation, the most spacious and pompous Europe had yet treated us to,
in spite of its fronting on the Rue Neuve Chaussee, a street of lively
shopping, by the measure of that innocent age, and with its own
ground-floor occupied by a bristling exhibition of indescribably futile
_articles de Paris_. Modern and commodious itself, it looked from its
balcony at serried and mismatched and quaintly-named haunts of old
provincial, of sedately passive rather than confidently eager, traffic;
but this made, among us, for much harmless inquisitory life--while we
were fairly assaulted, at home, by the scale and some of the striking
notes of our fine modernity. The young, the agreeable (agreeable to
anything), the apparently opulent M. Prosper Sauvage--wasn't it?--had
not long before, unless I mistake, inherited the place as a monument of
"family," quite modestly local yet propitious family, ambition; with an
ample extension in the rear, and across the clearest prettiest court,
for his own dwelling, which thus became elegant, _entre cour et
jardin_, and showed all the happy symmetries and proper conventions.
Here flourished, or rather, I surmise at this time of day, here
languished, a domestic drama of which we enjoyed the murmurous overflow:
frankly astounding to me, I confess, how I remain still in sensitive
presence of our resigned proprietor's domestic drama,