Читать книгу The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 50, December, 1861 - Various - Страница 5

Oh, that lesson of French! Two seats at the snug little writing-table, and only one witness of my blunders; for nobody ever thought of coming into the drawing-room before the breakfast-bell. Unfortunately for me, Ollendorff had not yet published his thefts from Manesca; and instead of that brisk little war of question and answer, which loosens the tongue so readily to strange sounds and forms the memory so promptly to the combinations of a new idiom, I had to struggle on through the scanty rules and multitudinous exceptions of grammar, and pick my way with the help of a dictionary through the harmonious sentences of "Télémaque." And never had sentences seemed so harmonious to my ears before; and never, I fear, before had my young friend's patience been so sorely tried, or her love of fun put under so unnatural a restraint. "Calypso ne pouvait se consoler," over and over and over again, her rosy lips moving slowly in order to give distinctness to every articulation, and her blue eyes fairly dancing with repressed laughter at my awkward imitation. If my teacher's patience could have given me a good pronunciation, mine would have been perfect. Day after day she came back to her task, and ever as the clock told nine would meet me at the door with the same genial smile.

Nearly twenty years afterwards I found myself once more in Paris, and at a large party at the house of the American Minister, the late Mr. King. As I was wandering through the rooms, looking at group after group of unknown faces, my eye fell upon one that I should have recognized at once as that of my first teacher of French, if it had not seemed to me impossible that twenty years could have passed over it so lightly.

"Who is that lady?" I asked of a gentleman near me, whom it was impossible not to set down at once for an American.

"Why, that is Madame de –, a grand-daughter of General Lafayette."

I can hardly account, at this quiet moment, for the sudden impulse that seized me; but resist it I could not; and walking directly up to her, I made my lowest bow, and, without giving her time to look me well in the face, repeated, with all the gravity I could command, "Calypso ne pouvait se consoler du départ d'Ulysse."

"O! Monsieur Greene," said she, holding out both her hands, "it must be you!"