Читать книгу A Bundle of Letters - Генри Джеймс, Henry Foss James - Страница 3

FROM MISS VIOLET RAY, IN PARIS, TO MISS AGNES RICH, IN NEW YORK

September 21st.

We had hardly got here when father received a telegram saying he would have to come right back to New York.  It was for something about his business—I don’t know exactly what; you know I never understand those things, never want to.  We had just got settled at the hotel, in some charming rooms, and mother and I, as you may imagine, were greatly annoyed.  Father is extremely fussy, as you know, and his first idea, as soon as he found he should have to go back, was that we should go back with him.  He declared he would never leave us in Paris alone, and that we must return and come out again.  I don’t know what he thought would happen to us; I suppose he thought we should be too extravagant.  It’s father’s theory that we are always running up bills, whereas a little observation would show him that we wear the same old rags FOR MONTHS.  But father has no observation; he has nothing but theories.  Mother and I, however, have, fortunately, a great deal of practice, and we succeeded in making him understand that we wouldn’t budge from Paris, and that we would rather be chopped into small pieces than cross that dreadful ocean again.  So, at last, he decided to go back alone, and to leave us here for three months.  But, to show you how fussy he is, he refused to let us stay at the hotel, and insisted that we should go into a family.  I don’t know what put such an idea into his head, unless it was some advertisement that he saw in one of the American papers that are published here.

There are families here who receive American and English people to live with them, under the pretence of teaching them French.  You may imagine what people they are—I mean the families themselves.  But the Americans who choose this peculiar manner of seeing Paris must be actually just as bad.  Mother and I were horrified, and declared that main force should not remove us from the hotel.  But father has a way of arriving at his ends which is more efficient than violence.  He worries and fusses; he “nags,” as we used to say at school; and, when mother and I are quite worn out, his triumph is assured.  Mother is usually worn out more easily than I, and she ends by siding with father; so that, at last, when they combine their forces against poor little me, I have to succumb.  You should have heard the way father went on about this “family” plan; he talked to every one he saw about it; he used to go round to the banker’s and talk to the people there—the people in the post-office; he used to try and exchange ideas about it with the waiters at the hotel.  He said it would be more safe, more respectable, more economical; that I should perfect my French; that mother would learn how a French household is conducted; that he should feel more easy, and five hundred reasons more.  They were none of them good, but that made no difference.  It’s all humbug, his talking about economy, when every one knows that business in America has completely recovered, that the prostration is all over, and that immense fortunes are being made.  We have been economising for the last five years, and I supposed we came abroad to reap the benefits of it.

As for my French, it is quite as perfect as I want it to be.  (I assure you I am often surprised at my own fluency, and, when I get a little more practice in the genders and the idioms, I shall do very well in this respect.)  To make a long story short, however, father carried his point, as usual; mother basely deserted me at the last moment, and, after holding out alone for three days, I told them to do with me what they pleased!  Father lost three steamers in succession by remaining in Paris to argue with me.  You know he is like the schoolmaster in Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village”—“e’en though vanquished, he would argue still.” He and mother went to look at some seventeen families (they had got the addresses somewhere), while I retired to my sofa, and would have nothing to do with it.  At last they made arrangements, and I was transported to the establishment from which I now write you.  I write you from the bosom of a Parisian ménage—from the depths of a second-rate boarding-house.