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
mooning, no patience with any substitute for his very own humour. We had
another schoolmate, this one native to the soil, whose references were
with the last vividness local and who was yet to escape with brilliancy
in the aftertime the smallest shadow of effacement. His most direct
reference at that season was to the principal pastry-cook's of the town,
an 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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