 28. There comes to me, in spite of these memories of an extended connection, a sense as of some shrinkage or decline in the bourgeois of the institution, which seems to have found its current run a bit thick and troubled, rather than with the pleasant plash in which we at first appeared all equally to bathe. I gather, as I try to reconstitute, that the general enterprise simply proved a fantasy not workable, and that at any rate the elders, and often such queer elders, tended to outnumber the candid jeunesse, so that I wonder by the same token on what theory of the Castilian spring, as taught there to trickle, if not to flow, Mr. Ussay, holding his small son by the heel as it were, may have been moved to dip him into our well. Shall I blush to relate that my own impression of its virtue must have come exactly from this uncanny turn taken, and quite in spite of the high Verzon-dier ideals, by the amvres-somblable House of Entertainment, where the assimilation of no form of innocence was doubted of by reason of the forms of experience that insisted somehow on cropping up, and no form of experience too directly deprecated by reason of the originally plotted tender growths of innocence. And some of these shapes were precisely those from which our good principle may well have first drawn his liveliest reassurance. I seem to remember such ancient American virgins in a special, and such odd, and either distinctively long-necked or more particularly long-haired and chinless compatriots, in black frock coats of no type or cut, so suggested application at all as garments. Application, that is, to anything in the nature of character or circumstance, function or position, gathered about in the groups that Monsieur Bonfant almost terrorized by his refusal to recognize among the barbarous races any approach to his view of the great principle of diction. I remember deeply and privately enjoying some of his shades of scorn, and seeing how, given his own background, they were thoroughly founded. I remember above all as burnt in by the impression he gave me of the creature wholly animated and containing no waste-expressional spaces, no imaginative flatnesses, the notion of the luxury of life, though indeed of the amount of trouble of it too, when none of the letters of the alphabet of sensibility might be dropped, involved in being a Frenchman. The liveliest lesson I must have drawn, however, from that source makes in any case at the best an odd educational connection, given the kind of concentration at which education, even such as ours, is supposed especially to aim. I speak of that direct promiscuity of insights which might easily have been pronounced profitless, with their attendant impressions and quickens sensibilities, yielding as these last did harvests of apparitions. I positively cherish at the present hour the fond fancy that we all soaked in some such sublime element as might still have hung about there. I mean on the very spot, from the vital presence so lately extinct of the prodigious Balzac, which had involved, as by its mere respiration, so dense a cloud of other presences, so arrayed an army of interrelated shades, that the air was still thick as with the fumes of witchcraft, with infinite seeing and supposing and creating, with a whole imaginative traffic. The poncion vocay, then but lately existed, according to Le Père Goriot, on the other side of the Seine, was still to be revealed to me, but the figures peopling it are not today essentially more intense. That is, as a matter of the marked and featured, the terrible and the touching, as compared with the paleness of the conned page in general, that I persuade myself, with so little difficulty, that I found the more numerous and more shifting, though properly doubtless less inspiring, constituents of the poncion faisandier. Fantastic and all subjective, that I should attribute a part of their interest, or that of the scene spreading round them, to any competent perception, in the small boy mind, that the general or public moment had a rarity and a brevity, a sharp intensity of its own, ruffling all things as they came with the morning breath of the second empire, and making them twinkle back with the light of resigned acceptance, a freshness of cynicism, the force of a great grimacing example. The grimace might have been legibly there in the air, to the young apprehension, and could I but simplify this record enough, I should represent everything as part of it. I seemed at any rate, meanwhile, to think of the faisandier young men, young Englishman mostly, who were getting up their French in that many-coloured air, for what I supposed in my candor to be appointments and posts, diplomatic, commercial, vaguely official, and who, as I now infer, though I didn't altogether embrace it at the time, must, under the loose rule of the establishment, have been amusing themselves not a little. It was as a side-wind of their free criticism, I take it, that I felt the first chill of an apprehended decline of the establishment, some pang of pre-vision of what might come, and come as with a crash, of the general fine fallacy on which it rested. Their criticism was for that matter free enough, causing me to admire it even while it terrified. They expressed themselves in terms of magnificent scorn, such as might naturally proceed, I think I felt, from a mightier race. They spoke of poor old bonfant, they spoke of our good faisandier 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 Deshune, 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 fondre 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 today 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 faisandier 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-Élysées 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 instance with a sign of recognition, but I recover in a special, the sense of an evening hour during which I had accompanied my mother to the Hotel Maurice, 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 psorias' 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'Angoulême, had been followed by a migration to the Rue Montaigne, with a period, or rather with two periods, of long surmère interwoven, and we might have made our beguiled way from either domicile. And the whole impression seemed to hang two numerous lamps, and two glittering vitrine, about the poor Pendleton's bereavement, their loss of their only, their so sturdily handsome little boy, and to suffuse their state with the warm, rich exhalations of subterraneous cookery, with which I find my recall of Paris from those years, so disproportionately, and so quite other than stomachically charged. The point of all of which is simply that, just as we had issued from the hotel, my mother anxiously urging me through the cross currents and queer contacts, as it were, of the great bazaar, of which the Rue de Rivoli was then a much more bristling avenue than now, rather than depending on me for support and protection, their swung interview the most splendid, as I at least esteemed him, of my elders and betters in the Rue Balzac, who had left the questions there supposedly engaging us, far behind, and with his high hat, a trifle askew, and his cigar actively alight, revealed to me at a glance what it was to be in full possession of Paris. There was speed in his step assurance in his air, he was visibly impatiently on the way, and he gave me thereby my first full image of what it was exactly to be on the way. He gave it the more doubtless through the fact that, with a flourish of the aforesaid high hat, from which the Englishman of that age was so singularly inseparable, he testified to the act of recognition and to deference to my companion. But with a grand big boy good humor, that, as I remember from childhood the so frequent effect of an easy patronage, compared with the topmost overlooking on the part of an admired senior, only gave an accent to the difference, as if he cared or could have, that I but went forth through the Paris night in the hand of my mama, while he had greeted us with a grace that was a beat of the very wings of freedom. Of such shreds at any rate proves to be woven the stuff of young sensibility, when memory, if sensibility has it all existed for it, rummages over our old trunkful of spiritual duds, and drawing forth ever so tenderly this, that and the other tattered web, holds up the pattern to the light. I find myself in this connection so restlessly and tenderly rummage that the tatters, however thin, come out in hands full, and every shred seems tangled with another. Gertrude Pendleton's mere name, for instance, becomes, and very preferably, the frame of another and a better picture. Drawing to it cognate associations, those of that element of the New York Cousinship, which had originally operated to place there, in a shining and even, as it were, an economic light, a preference for Paris, which preference, during the period of the Rue d'Angoulin and the Rue Montaigne, we wistfully saw at play, the very lightest and freest on the part of the inimitable masons. Their earlier days of tour and trouvile were over. A period of relative rigor at the Florence of the still encircling walls, the still so existent abuses and felicities, was also, I seem to gather, a thing of the past. Great accessions, consciously awaited during the previous leaner time, had beautifully befallen them, and my own whole consciousness of the general air, so insistently I discriminate for that alone, was colored by a familiar view of their enjoyment of these on a tremendously draped and festooned premier of the Rue Saint-Honoré, bristling with ormalu and pradier statuettes, and looking almost straight across to the British Embassy, rather a low premier, after the manner of an entre-sceau, as I remember it, and where the closed windows, which but scantily distinguished between our own sounds and those of the sociable, and yet the terrible streets of records and memories, seem to maintain an air and a light thick with a mixture of every sort of queer old Parisian amenity, and reference, as if to look or to listen or to touch were somehow at the same time to probe, to recover and communicate, to behold, to taste, and even to smell, to one's greater assault by suggestion, no doubt, but also to the effect of some sweet and strange repletion, as from the continued consumption, say, out of flounced and puckered boxes, of serried rows of chocolate and other bonbon. I must have felt the whole thing as something for one's developed senses to live up to and make light of, and have been rather ashamed of my own for just a little sickishly staggering under it. This goes, however, with the fondest recall of our cousin's inbred ease from far back in all such assumable relations, and of how four of the simplest, sweetest, best-natured girls, as they were, with the eldest a charming beauty to settle on the general ground, after marriage and widowhood, and still to be blooming there. They were possessed of the scene and its great reaches and resources and possibilities, in a degree that reduced us to small provincialism, and a hanging on their lips when they told us, that is when the gentlest of Mamaz and the lovely daughter who was out did, of presentations at the Tuileries, to the then all-wonderful, the ineffable Empress. Reports touchingly qualified on the part of our so exposed, yet after all so scantily indurated relatives, by the question of whether occasions so great didn't perhaps nevertheless profane the Sundays for which they were usually appointed. There was something of an implication in the air of those days, when young Americans were more numerously lovely than now, or at least more wide-eyed, it would fairly appear, that some account of the only tradition they had ever been rumored to observe, that of the Lord's Day, might have been taken even at the Tuileries. But what most comes back to me as the very note and fragrance of the New York Cousinship in this general connection, is a time that I remember to have glanced at on a page distinct from these, when the particular cousins I now speak of had conceived, under the influence of I know not what unextinguished morning star, the liveliest taste for the earliest possible rambles and researches, in which they were so good as to allow me, when I was otherwise allowed, to participate, health-giving walks of an extraordinarily matinal character, at the hour of the meticulous rag pickers, and exceptionally French polishers known to the Paris dawns of the Second Empire, as at no time since, which made us all feel together, under the conduct of honor in, bright child of the pavement herself, as if we, in our fresh curiosity and admiration, had also something to say to the great show presently to be opened, and were free throughout the place, as those are free of a house who know its aspects of attic and cellar or how it looks from behind. I call our shepherdess honorine, even though perhaps not infallibly, naming the sociable Soubret, who might, with all her gay bold confidence, have been an official inspectress in person, and to whose easy care, or more particularly, expert sensibility and candor of sympathy and curiosity, our flock was freely confided. If she wasn't honorine, she was Clémontine, or Augustine, which is a trifle, since what I thus recover, in any case, of these brushings of the strange Parisian dew, is those communities of contemplation that made us most hang about the jeweler's windows in the Palais Royal, and the public playbills of the theaters on the Boulevard. The Palais Royal, now so dishonored and disavowed, was then the very Paris of Paris. The shutters of the shops seemed taken down at that hour for our especial benefit, and I remember well how the dressing of so large a number of the compact and richly condensed fronts, being more often than not a matter of diamonds and pearls, rubies and sapphires, that represented in their ingenuities of combination and contortion. The highest taste of the time, I found open to me any amount of superior study of the fact that the spell of gems seemed for the feminine nature almost alarmingly boundless. I stared too, it comes back to me, at these exhibitions, and perhaps even thought it became a young man of the world to express as to this or that object a refined and intelligent preference. But what I really most had before me was the chorus of abjection, as I might well have called it, led, at the highest pitch, by honorine, and vaguely suggesting to me, by the crudity, so to say, of its wistfulness, a natural frankness of passion, goodness new in fact, for my small intelligence really didn't, what depths of corruptibility. Droll enough, as I win them again, these queer dim plays of consciousness. My sense that my innocent companions, honorine and tet, would have done anything or everything for the richest ruby, and that though one couldn't oneself be decently dead to that richness, one didn't at all know what anything might be, or in the least what everything was. The gushing cousins at the same time assuredly knew still less of that, and honorine's brave gloss of a whole range alike of possibilities and actualities was in itself a true social grace. They all enjoyed, in fine, while I somehow but wastefully mused, which was, after all, my form of enjoyment. I was shy for it, though it was a truth, and perhaps odd enough with all, that I didn't really at all care for gems. That rubies and pearls, in no matter what collocations, left me comparatively cold. That I actually cared for them about as little as, monstrously, secretly, painfully, I cared for flowers. Later on I was to become aware that I adored trees and architectural marbles. That for a sufficient slab of a sufficiently rare, sufficiently bestreaked or emperpled marble, in particular, I would have given a bag of rubies. But by then the time had passed for my being troubled to make out what, in that case, would represent, on a small boy's part, the corruptibility, so to call it, proclaimed, before the vitrine, by the cousins. That hadn't, as a question, later on its actuality, but it had so much at the time that, if it had been frankly put to me, I must have quite confessed my inability to say, and must, I gather, by the same stroke have been ashamed of such inward penury, feeling that as a boy I showed more poorly than girls. There was a difference, meanwhile, for such puzzlements before the porticos of the theaters. All questions melted for me there, into the single depth of envy. Envy of the equal, the beatific command of the evening hour, in the regime of honorine's young train, who were fresh for the early sparrow, and the chiffonier, even after shedding buckets of tears the night before, and not so much as for the first or the second time, over the beautiful story of la dame au camellia. There indeed was another humiliation, but by my weakness of position, much more than of nature. Whatever doing of everything, might have been veiled to me, as a means to the end. I would certainly have done it, for a sight of madame douche, and factère, in Dumas' triumphant ittle, now enjoying the fullest honors of innocuous classicism, with which, as with the merits of its interpreters, honorine's happy charges had become perfectly, and if not quite serenely, at least ever so responsively and feelingly familiar. Of a wondrous mixed sweetness and sharpness and queerness of unafaced reminiscence, is all that aspect of the cousins and the rambles, and the overlapping nights melting along the odorously bedamped, and retouched streets and arcades, bright in the ineffable morning light above all, of our peculiar young culture and candour, all of which again, has too easily led me to drop for a moment my more leading clue of that radiation of good nature from Gertrude Pendleton, and her headlong hospitalities in which we perhaps most complacently basked. The becraped passage at Maurices, alluded to a little back, was of a later season, and the radiation, as I recall it, had been that first winter, mainly from a petit hotel, somewhere on the other side, as we used with a large sketchiness to say, of the Champs-Élysées, a region at that time reduced to no regularity, but figuring to my fond fancy, as a chaos of accidents and contrasts, where petit hotel of archaic type were elbowed by woodyards and cabarets, and pavilions ever so characteristic, yet ever so indefinable, snuggled between frank industries and vulgarities, all brightened these indeed by the sociable note of Paris, be it only that of chaffering or of other bavardies. The great consistencies of arch refinement, now of so large a harmony, were still to come, so that it seemed rather original to live there, in spite of which the attraction of the hazard of it, on the part of our then so uniformly natural young kinswoman, not so much ingeniously or even expressively, as just justicatively and helplessly gay, since that earlier pitch of New York parlance scarce arrived at, or for that matter pretended to, annunciation, was quite in what I at least took to be the glitter of her very conventions and traditions themselves. Exemplified, for instance, by a bright nocturnal christening party in honour of the small son of all hopes, whom she was so precipitately to lose, an occasion which, as we had in our way known the act of baptism, but has so abbreviated, and in fact so tacit a business, had the effect for us of one of the great forms of a society taking itself with typical seriousness. We were much more serious than the pendultons, but, paradoxically enough, there was that weakness in our state of our being able to make no such attestation of it. The evening can have been but of the friendliest, easiest, and least pompous nature, with small guests in congruity with its small hero, as well as large. But I must have found myself more than ever yet in presence of a right, one of those round which as many kinds of circumstances possible clustered, so that the more of these there were, the more one might imagine a great social order observed. How shall I now pretend to say how many kinds of circumstance I supposed I recognized, with the remarkable one to begin with, and which led fancy so far afield that the religious ceremony was at the same time a party of twinkling lustres and disposed flowers and ladies with bare shoulders, that platitudinous bareness of the period that suggested somehow the moral line drawn as with a ruler and a firm pencil. With little English girls, daughters of the famous physician of that nationality, then pursuing a Parisian career, he must have helped the little victim into the world, and whose emphasized type much impressed itself. With round glazed and bereaved boxes of multi-colored sugared almonds, draget debaptem, above all, which we harvested in their heaps, as we might have gathered apples from a shaken tree, and which symbolized as nothing else the ritual dignity. Perhaps this grand impression really came back but to the draget debaptem, not strictly more immemorial to our young appreciation, than the New Year's cake and the election cake known to us in New York, yet immensely more official, and of the nature of scattered largesse. Partly through the days and days, as it seemed to me, that our life was to be furnished, reinforced, and almost encumbered with them. It wasn't simply that they were so toothsome, but that they were somehow so important, and so historic. It was with no such frippery, however, that I connected the occasional presence among us of the young member of the cousinship, in this case of the maternal, who most moved me to wistfulness of wonder, though not at all, with his then marked difference of age, by inviting my free approach. Vernon King, to whom I have in another part of this record alluded, at that time doing his baccalaureate on the other side of the sand, and coming over to our world that scraps of moments, for I recall my awe of the tremendous nature, as I supposed it, of his toil. As to quite a make-believe and gingerbread place, the lightest of substitutes for the Europe, in which he had been from the first so technically plunged. His mother and sister, also on an earlier page referred to, had, from their distance, committed him to the great city to be finished educationally, to the point that for our strenuous cousin Charlotte was the only proper one. And I feel sure he can have acquitted himself, in this particular, in a manner that would have passed for brilliant, if such lights didn't, thanks to her stiff little standards, always tend to burn low in her presence. These ladies were to develop more and more the practice of living in odd places for abstract, inhuman reasons. At Marseille, at Dusseldorf, if I rightly recall, their principal German sojourn. At Naples above all for a long stage, where in particular, their grounds of residence were somehow not as those of others, even though I recollect, from a much later time, attending them there at the opera, and experience which, in their fashion, they succeeded in despoiling for me of every element of the concrete, or at least of the pleasantly vulgar. Later impressions, few but firm, were so to enhance one's tenderness for Vernon's own image. The most interesting, surely, in all the troupe of our young kinsmen, early baffled and gathered, that he glances at me out of the Paris period, fresh-colored, just blonde-bearded, always smiling and catching his breath a little, as from a mixture of eagerness and shyness, with such an appeal to the right idealization, or to belated justice, as makes of mere evocation a sort of exercise of loyalty. It seemed quite richly laid upon me at the time, I get it all back, that he, two or three years older than my elder brother, and dipped more early, as well as held more firmly, in the deep, the refining waters, the virtue of which we all together, though with our differences of consistency, recognized, was the positive and living proof of what the process, comparatively poor for ourselves, could do at its best, and with clay originally and domestically needed to the right plasticity. Besides which, he shone to my fancy, and all the more for its seeming so brightly and quietly in his very grain, with the vague, the supposititious, with the intensely accent giving stamp of the Latin quarter, which we so thinly imagined, and so superficially brushed on our pious walks to the Luxembourg, and through the parts where the glamour might have hung thickest. We were to see him a little, but two or three times, three or four years later, when, just before our own return, he had come back to America, for the purpose, if my memory serves, of entering the Harvard Law School, and to see him still, always with the smile, that was essentially as facial, as livingly and loosely fixed somehow, as his fresh complexion itself, always too with the air of caring so little, for what he had been put through, that, under any appeal to give out, more or less wonderfully, some sample or echo of it, as who should say, he still mostly panted as from a laughing mental embarrassment. He had been put through too much, it was all stale to him, and he wouldn't have known where to begin. He did give out a little on occasion, speaking that is, on my different plane, as it were, and by the roundabout report of my brother. He gave out, it appeared, as they walked together across shining Newport sands, some fragment, some beginning, of a very youthful poem that Europe had, with other results, moved him to, and a faint, thin shred of which was to stick in my remembrance for reasons independent of its quality. Harold, rememberst thou the day we rode along the Appian Way? Neglected tomb and altar cast, their lengthening shadow o'er the plain, and while we talked, the mighty past, around us lived and breathed the gain. That was European enough, and yet he had returned to America really to find himself, even with every effort made immediately near him to defeat the discovery. He found himself, with the outbreak of the war, simply as the American soldier, and not under any bribe, however dim, of the epaulet or the Gert sword, but just as the common enlisting native, which he smiled and gasped, to the increase of his happy shortness of breath, as from a repletion of culture, since it suggested no lack of personal soundness, at feeling himself so like to be. As strange, yet as still more touching than strange, I recall the sight, even at a distance, of the drop straight off him, of all his layers of educational varnish, the possession of the advantages, the tongues, the degrees, the diplomas, the reminiscences, a saturation too that had all sunk in, a sacrifice of precious attributes that might almost have been viewed as a wild bonfire. So his prodigious mother, whom I have perhaps sufficiently presented for my reader to understand, didn't fail to view it. Judging it also sharply hostile to the action of the North, as the whole dreadful situation found her, with deep and resentful displeasure. I remember how I thought of Vernon himself, during the business, as at once so despoiled, so diverted, and above all so resistently bright, as vaguely to suggest something more in him still, some deep down reaction, some extremity of indifference and defiance, some exhibition of a young character too long pressed and impressed, too long prescribed to, and with too much expected of it, and all under too firmer a will, so that the public pretext had given him a lift or lent him wings, which without its greatness might have failed him. As the case was to turn, nothing, that is nothing he most wanted, and remarkably most enjoyed, did fail him at all. I forget with which of the possible states, New York, Massachusetts, or Rhode Island, though I think the first, he had taken service, only seeming to remember that this all went on for him at the start in McClellands and later on in Grant's army, and that, badly wounded in a Virginia battle, he came home to be nursed by his mother, recently restored to America for a brief stay. She held, I believe in the event, that he had, under her care, given her his vow that, his term being up, he would not, should he get sufficiently well, re-engage. The question here was between them, but it was definite that, materially speaking, she was in no degree dependent on him. The old, the irrepressible adage, however, was to live again between them. When the devil was sick, the devil, a saint, would be. When the devil was well, the devil, a saint, was he. The devil, a saint, at all events, was Vernon, who denied that he had passed his word, and who, as soon as he had surmounted his first disablement, passionately and quite admirably re-enlisted. At once restored to the front, and to what now gave life for him its indispensable relish, he was in the thick again of the great carnage round about Richmond, where, again gravely wounded, he, as I figure, still incorrigibly smiling, succumbed. His mother had by this time indignantly returned to Europe, accompanied by her daughter and her younger son, the former of whom accepted, for our great pity, a little later on, the office of closing the story. Anne King, young and frail, but not less firm under stress than the others of her blood, came back on her brother's death, and quietest, most colorless, Electra of elucidist oresties, making her difficult way amid massed armies and battle-drenched fields, got possession of his buried body, and bore it for re-enterment to Newport, the old habitation, as I have mentioned, of their father's people, both Vernons and Kings. It must have been to see my mother, as well as to sail again for Europe, that she afterwards came to Boston, where I remember going down with her, at the last, to the dock of the English steamer, some black and tub-like cunardar, an archaic Africa or Asia, sufficing to the Boston service of those days. I saw her off drearily and helplessly enough, I well remember, and even at that moment found for her another image. What was she most like, though in a still sparer and drier form, but some low-toned, some employed little Bronte heroine, though more indeed a loosey snow than a Jane Eyre, and with no shade of a Bronte hero within sight. To this all the fine privilege and fine culture of all the fine countries, collective matter from far back of our intimated envy, had amounted. Just as it had amounted for Vernon to the bare headstone on the Newport hillside, where, by his mother's decree, as I have already noted, there figured no hint of the manner of his death. So grand, so finely personal a manner it appeared to me at the time. And has indeed appeared ever since that this brief record irrepressibly springs from that. His mother, as I have equally noted, was, however, with her views, to find no grace in it so long as she lived, and his sister went back to her and to Marseille, as they always called it, but prematurely to die. End of Chapter 28. I feel that much might be made of my memories of Boulogne-sur-Mer, had I but here left room for the vast little subject, in which I should probably once started, wander to and fro as exploringly, as perceivingly, as discoveringly, I am fairly tempted to call it, as might really give the measure of my small operations at the time. I was almost wholly reduced there to operations of that mere inward and superficially idle order, at which we have already so freely assisted. Reduced by a cause, I shall presently mention, the production of a great blur, well nigh after the fashion of some mild domestic, but quite considerably spreading grease spot, in respect to the world of action, such as it was, more or less immediately about me. I must personally have lived, during this pale predicament, almost only by seeing what I could after my incorrigible, ambulent fashion, a practice that may well have made me pass for bringing home nothing in the least exhibitional, rather than by pursuing the inquiries and interests that agitated to whatever intensity are on the whole widening little circle. The images I speak of as a matter for more evocation than I can spare them, were the fruit of two different periods at Boulang, a shorter and a longer, this second appearing to us all at the time I gather, too endlessly and blightingly prolonged. So sharply, before it was over, did I at any rate come to yearn for the Rumang Tang again. The Rumang Tang sublet, for a term, under a flurry produced in my parents' breasts by a financial crisis of great violence, to which the American world, as a matter now of recorded history, I believe, had tragically fallen victim, and which had imperiled or curtailed for some months our moderate means of existence. We were to recover, I make out, our disturbed balance, and were to pursue a while further our chase of the alien, the somehow repeatedly postponed, real opportunity. And the second, the comparatively cramped and depressed connection with the classic refuge as it then was of spasmodic thrift, when not of settled indigence, for the embarrassed of our race, in the largest sense of this matter, was to be shuffled off at last with no scant relief and reaction. This is perhaps exactly why the whole picture of our existence at the Padakalei watering-place pleads to me now for the full indulgence what would be, in other words, every touch of tenderness workable, after all the years, over the lost and confused and above all on their own side, ultimately rather vulgarized and violated little sources of impression. Items and aspects these, which while they in their degree and after their sort flourished, we only asked to admire, or at least to appreciate, for their rewarding extreme queerness. The very centre of my particular consciousness of the place turned too soon to the fact of my coming in there for the gravest illness of my life, an all but mortal attack of the malignant typhus of old days, which after laying me as low as I could well be laid for many weeks, condemned me to a convalescence so arduous that I saw my apparently scant possibilities by the measure of them then taken, even as through a glass darkly, or through the expansive blur for which I found just above a homely image. This experience was to become, when I had emerged from it, the great reminiscence or circumstance of all belonging for me, and I was to regard it with much intelligence I should have maintained, as the marked limit of my state of being a small boy. I took on, when I had decently, and all the more because I had so retardedly recovered, the sense of being a boy of other dimensions somehow altogether, and even with a new dimension introduced and acquired, a dimension that I was eventually to think of as a stretch in the direction of essential change, or of living straight into a part of myself previously quite unvisited, and now made accessible as by the sharp forcing of a closed door. The blur of consciousness imagined by my grease spot was not, I hasten to declare, without its relenting edges, and even, during its major insistence, fainter thicknesses. Short of which I see my picture, the picture I was always so incurably after, would have failed of animation altogether, quite have failed to bristle with characteristics, with figures and objects, and scenic facts, particular passages and moments, the stuff, in short, of that scrap of minor gain which I have spoken of as our multiplied memories. Wasn't I even at the time, and much more later on, to feel how we had been through the thick and thin of the whole adventure, assaulted as never before, in so concentrated a way, by local and social character? Such was the fashion after which the Boulang of long ago, I have known next to nothing of it since, could come forth, come more than half way, as we say, to meet the imagination open to such advances. It was, taking one thing with another, so verily drenched in character that I see myself catching this fine flagrancy almost equally in everything, unless indeed I may have felt it rather smothered than presented on the comparatively sordid scene of the collège communal, not long afterwards to expand, I believe, into the local lycee, to which the inimitable process of our education promptly introduced us. I was to have less of the collège than my elder and my younger brother, thanks to the interrupting illness that placed me so long, with its trail of after effects, half complacently, half ruefully apart. But I suffered for a few early weeks, the mainly malodorous sense of the braver life, produced as this was by a deeply democratic institution from which no small son, even of the most sopless home, could possibly know exclusion. Odd, I recognize, that I should inhale the air of the place so particularly, so almost only, to that dismal effect. Since character was there, too, for whom it should concern, and my view of some of the material conditions, of the general collegiate presence toward the top of the steepish grand rue on the right, and not much short as it comes back to me, of the then closely clustered and inviolate oatmeal, the more or less surviving old town, the idle grey rampart, the moted and towered citadel, the tree-shaded bastion for strolling and sitting, immortalized by thackery, achieved the monumental, in its degree, after a fashion never yet associated for us with the pursuit of learning, didn't the campaigner, suffering indigence at the misapplied hands of Colonel Newcomb, rage at that hushed victim supremely and dreadfully just thereabouts, by which I mean in the oatmeal, over some question of a sacrificed sweetbread or a cold-hacked joint that somebody had been at. Besides such builded approaches to an education as we had elsewhere known, the Collège exhibited, with whatever reserves, the measure of style, which almost any French accident of the administratively architectural order more easily rises to than fails of. Even if the matter be but a question of the shyest similitude of a coordonneur, the court disconnecting the scene, by intention at least, from the basely bourgeois and giving value to the whole effect of a posed and windowed wall and important or balanced and placed terrain. These are many words for the dull precinct, as then presented, I admit, and they are perhaps half-prompted by a special association. Too ghostly now quite to catch again. The sense of certain Sundays distinct from the grim, that is the flatly instructional body of the week, when I seem to myself to have successfully flouted the whole constituted field by passing across it and from it to some quite ideally old world, little annexed Musée de Provence, as inviolate in its way as the grey rampart and bare citadel, and very like them in unrelieved tone, where I repeatedly and without another presence to hinder looked about me at goodness knows what weird ancientries of stale academic art. Not one of these treasures in its habit as it lived, do I recall. Yet the sense and the note of them was at the time, nonetheless, not so elusive that I didn't somehow draw straight from them intimations of the interesting, that is revelations of the aesthetic, the historic, the critical mystery and charm of things, of such things taken altogether, that added to my small loose handful of the seed of culture. That apprehension was, in its way, of our house of learning, too, and yet I recall how on the scant and simple terms I have glanced at I quite reveled in it, whereas other impressions of my brief ordeal shrink for anything in the nature of interest, but to three or four recovered marks of the social composition of the school. There were the sons of all the small shopkeepers, and not less by my remembrance, of certain of the mechanics and artisans. But there was also the English contingent, these predominantly ank-tan and uniformed, blue-jacketed and brass-buttoned, even to an effect of odd redundancy, who by my conceit gave our association a lift. Vivid still to me is the summer morning on which, in the wide court, as wide, that is, as I liked to suppose it, and where we hung about helplessly enough for recreation, a brownish, black-eyed youth of about my own degree of youthfulness, mentioned to me with an error that comes back as that of the liveliest informational resource the outbreak just heard of, of an awful mutiny in India, where his military parents, who had not so long before sent him over thence, with such weakness of imagination, as I measured it, to the poor spot on which we stood, were in mortal danger of their lives, so that news of their having been killed would perhaps be already on the way. They might well have been military, these impressively exposed characters, since my friend's name was Napier, or Napier, as he was called at the school, and since, I may add also, they're attached to him in my eyes, the glamour of an altogether new emphasis of type. The English boys within our ken, since our coming abroad, had been of the fewest. The Faisondier youths, whether English or American, besides being but scantly boys, had been so lost on that scene, in our heap of disparities, and it pressed upon me, after a fashion of its own, that those we had known in New York, and all aware of their varieties and personalities, as one had supposed oneself, had in no case challenged the restless placing impulse, with any such force as the finished little Napier. They had not been, as he was, by the very perversity of his finish, resultants of forces at all, or comparatively speaking, it was as if their producing elements had been simple and few, whereas behind this more mixed and, as we have learned to say, evolved companion, his very simplicities, his gaps of possibility being still evolved, there amassed itself I couldn't have said what protective social order, what tangled creative complexity. Why I should have thought him almost Indian of stamp and hue, because his English parents were of the so general Indian peril, is more than I can say. Yet I have his exotic, and above all his bold, his imaginably even bad, young face, finally unacquainted with law, before me at this hour quite undimmed, announcing as I conceived it, and quite as a shock, any awful adventure that one would, as well as something that I must even at the time have vaguely taken as the play of the passions. He vanishes, and I dare say I but make him over as I make everything, and he must have led his life whatever it was to become, with the least possible waiting on the hour or the major consequence, and no waste of energy at all in the mooning, no patience with any substitute for his very own humour. We had another school mate, this one native to the soil, whose references were, with the last vividness, local, and who was yet to escape with brilliancy in the after time, the smallest shadow of a basement. His most direct reference at that season was to the principal pastry cooks of the town, an establishment we then found supreme for little crisscrossed apple tartlets, and melting baba, young Cochlan'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. Sebe Cochlan 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 gauge as it were of his long career as the most interesting and many-sided comedian, or at least most unsurpassed dramatic desire 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 round about 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 Nouve Chausse, 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 artic 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 Monsieur Prosper Sauvage, wasn't it? Had not long before, unless a 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 corps 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, in and out of which I see a pair of figures quite up to the dramatic mark, flit again with their air of the very rightest finish. I must but note these things nonetheless, and pass, for scarce another item of the whole Boulang concert of salient images failed after all, of the significance either still more strangely social, or more distinctively spectacular. These appearances indeed melt together for my interest. I once more feel as, during the interminable stretch of the prescribed and for the most part solitary airings, and outings involved in my slow convalescence from the extremity of fever, I approached that straightened and somewhat bedarkened issue of the rude le coup, was it, toward the bright-colored, strongly peopled port, just where meridues English library, solace of my vacuous hours and temple, in its degree too of deep initiations, mounted guard at the right. Here, frankly, discrimination drops. Every particular in the impression, once so quick and fresh, sits interlinked with every other in the large lap of the whole. The motley, sunny, breezy, bustling port, with its classic, its admirable fisherfolk of both sexes, models of type and tone, and of what might be handsomest in the thoroughly weathered condition, would have seemed the straightest appeal to curiosity, had not the old Thakarian side, as I may comprehensively call it, and the scattered wealth of illustration of his sharpest satiric range, not so constantly interposed and competed with it. The scene bristled, as I look back at it, with images from men's wives, from the society of Mr. Ducees, and that of fifty other figures of the same creation, with Beria Craces and Rodin Crawley's, and of course with Mrs. Max, with rosies of a more or less crumpled freshness and blighted bloom, with battered and bent, though doubtless, never quite so fine, Colonel Newcomb's not less, with more reminders, in short, than I can now gather in, of those forms of the seedy, the subtly sinister, the vainly genteel, the generally damaged and desperate, and in particular perhaps the invincibly impudent, all the marks, I feel sure, were stronger and straighter than such as we meet in generally like cases under our present levelling light. Such anointed and whiskered and eeked out, such brazen, bluffing, swaggering gentlemen, such floridly repaired ladies, their mates, all looking as hard as they could as if they were there for mere harmless amusement. It was as good among them as just being Arthur Pendennis to know so well, or at least to guess so fearfully, who and what they might be. They were floated on the tide of the manners then prevailing, I judge, with a rich processional effect that so many of our own grand lapses, when not of our mere final flatnesses, leave no material for, so that the living note of Boulang was really, on a more sustained view, the opposition between a native race the most happily tempered, the most becomingly seasoned and salted and self-dependent, and a shifting colony, so far as the persons composing it could, either urgently or speculatively shift, inimitably at odds with any active freshness. And the stale and the light, even though so scantily rebounding, the two densely socialized group, was the English, and the positive and hardy and steady, and windwashed, the French. And it was all as flushed with color and patched with costume, and referable to record and picture, to literature and history, as a more easily amusing and less earnestly uniform age could make it. When I speak of this opposition indeed, I see it again most take effect in an antithesis that, on one side and the other, swallowed all differences at a gulp. The general British show, as we had it there, in the artless mid-Victorian desert, had, I think, for its most sweeping sign, the high assurance of its doudiness. Whereas one had only to glance about at the seafaring and fisherfolk, who were the real strength of the place, to feel them shed at every step and by their every instinctive appearance, the perfect lesson of taste. There it was to be learned and taken home, with never a moral, nonetheless, drawn from it by the higher types. I speak, of course, in particular of the tanned and trust and kerchiefed, the active and productive women, also short-skirted and free-limbed under stress, for as by the rule of the dowdy, their sex is ever the finer example. So where the sense of the suitable, of the charmingly and harmoniously right prevails, they preserve the pitch, even as a treasure committed to their piety. To hit that happy mean of rightness amid the mixed occupations of a home-mother and a fish-wife, to be in a special, both so bravely stripped below and so perfectly enveloped above, as the deep-waiting, far-striding, shrimp-netting, crab-gathering matrons or maidens who played waste-tie with the tides, and racially quickened the market, was to make grace thoroughly practical and discretion thoroughly vivid. These attributes had with them all, for the I, however, arranged too great for me to follow, since as their professional undress was a turnout positively self-consistent, so their household, or more responsibly public, or altogether array, played through the varied essentials of fluted quaff, and folded kerchief, and sober skirt, and tense, dark, displayed stalking, and clicking wooden slipper, to say nothing of long-gold eardrop, or solid short-hung pectoral cross, with the respect for the rigor of conventions that had the beauty of self-respect. I owe to no season of the general period such a preserved sense of innumerable unaccompanied walks, at the reason of which luxury of freedom I have glanced, which as often as not, were through the steep and low-browed, and brightly dobbed, rouelle, of the fishing-town, and either across and along the level sea-marge and sustained cliff beyond, this latter the sight of the first Napoleon's so tremendously mustard camp of invasion, with a monument as futile by my remembrance as that enterprise itself had proved, to give it all the special accent I could ask for. Or I was as free for the oat veal, and the ramparts, and the scattered battered benches of reverie, if I may so honour my use of them. They kept me not less complacently in touch with those of the so anciently awed, and mainly contracted houses, over which the stiff citadel, and the ghost of Catherine de Medici, who had dismally sojourned in it, struck me as throwing such a chill, and one of which precisely must have witnessed the never-to-be-forgotten campaigner's passage in respect to her cold beef. Far from extinct for me is my small question of those hours, doubtless so mentally, so shamelessly wanton, as to what human life might be tucked away in such retreats, which expressed the last acceptance whether of desired or of imposed quiet. So absolutely appointed and obliged did I feel to make out, so far as I could, what, in so significant a world, they on their part, represented. I think the force mainly sustaining me at that rather dreary time, as I see it can only show for, was this lively felt need that everything should represent something more than what immediately and all too blankly met the eye. I seem to myself to have carried it about everywhere, and though of course only without outward signs, that might have betrayed my fatuity, and insistently quite yearningly applied it. What I wanted in my presumption was that the object, the place, the person, the unreduced impression, often doubtless, so difficult or so impossible to reduce, should give out to me something of a situation, living as I did in confused and confusing situations, and thus hooking them on however awkwardly to almost any at all living surface I chanced to meet. My memory of Boulang is that we had almost no society of any sort at home. There appearing to be about us, but one sort, and that of far too great, or too fearful, and immediate bravery. Yet there were occasional figures that I recover from our scant circle, and that I associate, whatever links I may miss, with the small still houses on the rampart, figures of the quaintest, quite perhaps the frowsiest little English ladies, in such mushroom hats, such extremely circular and bestriped scarlet petticoats, such perpetual tight gauntlets, such explicit claims to long dissent, which showed them for everything that everyone else at Boulang was not. These mid-Victorian samples of a perfect consistency, represented, by my measure, as hard as ever they could, and represented, of all things, literature and history and society. The literature was that of the three-volume novel, then, and for much after, enjoying its loosest and serenest spread, for they separately and anxiously and awfully wrote, and that must almost by itself have amounted in them to all the history I evoked. The dreary months, as I'm content that in their second phase especially, they should be called, are subject, I repeat, to the perversion, quite perhaps to the obscuration, of my temporarily hindered health, which should keep me from being too sure of these small proportions of experience. I was to look back afterwards, as over so gray a desert, through which, nonetheless, there flush as sharp little certainties, not to be disallowed, such matters as the general romance of Meridu, the English librarian before mentioned at the mouth of the port, a connection that thrust itself upon me now, as after all the truest center of my perceptions, waylaying my steps at the time, as I came and went, more than any other object or impression. The question of what that spot represented, or could be encouraged, could be aided and abetted to represent, may well have supremely engaged me, for depth within depth, there could open before me. The place meant, on these terms to begin with, frank and licensed fiction, licensed to my recordedly relaxed state, and what this particular luxury represented, it might have taken me even more time than I had to give to make out. The blessed novel in three volumes exercised through its form, to my sense, on grounds lying deeper for me today than my deepest sounding, an appeal that fairly made it do with me what it would. Possibly a driveling confession, and the more driveling perhaps, the more development I should attempt for it, from which, however, the very difficulty of the case saves me. Too many associations, too much of the ferment of memory and fancy, are somehow stirred. They beset me again, they hover and whirl about me, while I stand, as I used to stand, within the positively sanctified walls of the shop, so of the view-tomp now their aspect and fashion and worked system, by which I mean again of the frumpiest and civilest mid-Victorian, and surrender to the vision of the shelves packed with their rich individual trinities. Why should it have affected me so that my choice, so difficult in such a dazzle, could only be for a trinity? I am unable fully to say, such a magic dwelt in the mere rich fact of the trio. When the novel of that age was bad, as it so helplessly, so abjectly, and prevailingly consented to be, the three volumes still did something for it, a something that was, all strangely, not an aggravation of its case. When it was good, our analysis, our terms of appreciation, had a simplicity that has lingered on, they made it copiously opulently better, so that when, after the span of the years, my relation with them became, from that of comparatively artless reader, and to the effect of a superior fondness and acuteness, that of complacent author, the tradition of infatuated youth still flung over them its mantle, this at least till all relation, by one of the very rudest turns of life we of the profession were to have known, broke off in clumsy, interfering hands, and with almost no notice given, in a day, in an hour. Besides connecting me with the lost, but unforgotten note of waiting service and sympathy, that quavered on the merry-dew air, they represented just for intrinsic charm more than I could at any moment have given a plain account of. They fell, by their ineffable history, every trio I ever touched, into the category of such prized phenomena as my memory, for instance, of fairly hanging about the rude avar, at the season I speak of, through the apprehension that something vague and sweet, if I shouldn't indeed rather say something of infinite future point and application, would come of it. This is a reminiscence that nothing would induce me to verify, as, for example, by any revisiting light, but it was going to be good for me, good, that is, for what I was pleased to regard as my intelligence or my imagination, in fine, for my obscurity specific sense of things, that I should so have hung about. The name of the street was by itself of so gentle and intimate a persuasion, that I must have been ashamed not to proceed, for the very grace of it, to some shade of active response. And there was always a place of particular arrest, in the vista brief and blank, but inclusively blank, blank after ancient, settled, more and more subsiding things, blank almost in short, with all Matthew Arnold's on we of the Middle Ages, rather than poorly and meanly and emptyly, before such states, which was previously what I had most known of blankness. This determined pause was at the window of a spare and solitary shop, a place of no amplitude at all, but as of an inveterate cheerful confidence, where, among a few artists' materials, an exhibited watercolour from some native and possibly then admired hand, was changed but once in ever so long. That was perhaps, after all, the pivot of my revolution. The question of whether or no I should, at a given moment, find the old picture replaced. I made this, when I had the lock, passed for an event, yet an event which would have to have had, for its scene, the precious rude aviar, and pale though may be the recital of such pleasures, I lose myself in depths of kindness for my strain of ingenuity. All of which, and to that extent to be corrected, leaves small allowance for my service to good Monsieur Ancien, rendered while my elder and younger brothers, the younger completing our group of the ungovernist, were continuously subject to collegial durance. Their ordeal was, I still blush to think, appreciably the heavier, as compared with mine during our longer term of thrifty exile from Paris. The time of stress, as I find I recall it, when we had turned our backs on the rue Montagne, and my privilege was so to roam on the winter and the spring afternoons. Mild Monsieur Ancien, under whom, I, for some three hours each forenoon, sat sole and under-eyed, and actually by himself, too, was a curiosity, a benignity, a futility even I gather. But save for a felt and remembered impulse in me, to open the window of our scene of study as soon as he had gone, was in no degree an ideal. He might rise here, could I do him justice, as the rarest of my poor evocations. For he it was, to be frank, who most literally smelt of the view Tom, as to which I have noted myself as wandering and musing as much as might be, with recovered scraps and glimpses and other intimations, only never yet for such a triumph of that particular sense. To be still, Frank, he was little less than a monster, for mere unresisting or unresilient mass of personal presence, I mean. So that I fairly think of him as a form of bland porpoise, violently blowing in an age not his own, as by having had to exchange deep water for thin air. Thus he impressed me as with an absolute ancientry of type, of tone, of responsible taste above all. This last, I mean, in literature, since it was literature we sociably explored, to my at once charmed and shamed apprehension of the several firm traditions, the pure proprieties, the discussibilities, in the oddest way, both so many and so few, of that field as they prevailed to his pious view. I must have had hold in this mere sovereign sample of the accidentally, the quite unconsciously and unpretentiously, the all negligibly or superfluously handed down, of a rare case of the provincial and academic quiestre. Though even while I record it, I see the good man as too helpless and unaggressive, too smothered in his poor facts of person and circumstance, of overgrown time of life alone, to incur with justness the harshness of classification. He rested with a weight I scarce even felt, such easy terms he made, without scruple for both of us, on the cheerful innocence of my barbarism. And though our mornings were short and subject, I think, to quite drowsy lapses and other honest aridities, we did scumble together, I make out, by the aid of the collected extracts from the truly and academically great, which formed his sole resource, and which he had in a small portable and pocketed library, rather greasily preserved, some patch of picture, of a saving as distinguished from a losing classicism. The point remains for me that, when all was said, and even with everything that might directly have counted unsaid, he discharged for me such an office that I was to remain to this far off hour in a state of possession of him that is the very opposite of a blank, quite after the fashion again in which I had all along and elsewhere suffered and resisted, and yet so perversely and intimately appropriated tutoring, which was with as little as ever to show for my profit of his own express showings. The blank he fills out crowds itself with a wealth of value, since I shouldn't without him have been able to claim for whatever it may be worth a tenth, at that let me handsomely put it, of my working sense of the view Tom. How can I allow then that we hadn't planted together with a loose felicity some of the seed of work, even though the sprouting was so long put off? Everything, I have mentioned, had come at this time to be acceptedly, though far from braggingly, put off, and the ministrations of Monsieur Ancio really washed themselves over with the weak mixture that had begun to spread for me to immensity during that summer day or two of our earlier residence when, betraying strange pains and apprehensions, I was with all decision put to bed. Present to me still is the fact of my sharper sense, after an hour or two of my being there in distress, and, as happened for the moment, alone. Present to me are the sounds of the soft afternoon, the mild animation of the belong streets, through the half-opened windows. Present to me above all, the strange sense that something had begun that would make more difference to me, directly and indirectly, than anything had ever yet made. I might verily, on the spot, have seen, as in a fading of day, and a change to something suddenly queer, the whole large extent of it. I must thus, much impressed, but half scared, have wanted to appeal, to which end I tumbled, all too weakly, out of bed, and wavered toward the bell just across the room. The question of whether I really reached and rang it was to remain lost afterwards, in the strong, sick whirl of everything about me, under which I fell into a lapse of consciousness that I shall conveniently here treat as a considerable gap.