side of Waverley Place that really carry the imagination back to a
vanished social order. They carry mine to a stout red-faced lady with
grey hair and a large apron, the latter convenience somehow suggesting,
as she stood about with a resolute air, that she viewed her little
pupils as so many small slices cut from the loaf of life and on which
she was to dab the butter of arithmetic and spelling, accompanied by way
of jam with a light application of the practice of prize-giving. I
recall an occasion indeed, I must in justice mention, when the jam
really was thick--my only memory of a schoolfeast, strange to say,
throughout our young annals: something uncanny in the air of the
schoolroom at the unwonted evening or late afternoon hour, and tables
that seemed to me prodigiously long and on which the edibles were chunky
and sticky. The stout red-faced lady must have been Irish, as the name
she bore imported--or do I think so but from the indescribably Irish
look of her revisited house? It refers itself at any rate to a New York
age in which a little more or a little less of the colour was scarce
notable in the general flush.
Of pure unimported strain, however, were Miss Sedgwick and Mrs. Wright
(Lavinia D.), the next figures in the procession--the procession that
was to wind up indeed with two foreign recruits, small brown snappy
Mademoiselle Delavigne, who plied us with the French tongue at home and
who had been introduced to us as the niece--or could it have been the
grandniece?--of the celebrated Casimir, and a large Russian lady in an
extraordinarily short cape (I like to recall the fashion of short capes)
of the same stuff as her dress, and Merovingian sidebraids that seemed
to require the royal crown of Fredegonde or Brunehaut to complete their
effect. This final and aggravational representative of the compromising
sex looms to my mind's eye, I should add, but as the creature of an
hour, in spite of her having been domiciled with us; whereas I think of
Mademoiselle Delavigne as flitting in and out on quick, fine, more or
less cloth-shod feet of exemplary neatness, the flat-soled feet of Louis
Philippe and of the female figures in those volumes of Gavarni then
actual, then contemporaneous, which were kept in a piece of furniture
that stood between the front-parlour windows in Fourteenth Street,
together with a set of Beranger enriched by steel engravings to the
strange imagery of which I so wonderingly responded that all other art
of illustration, ever since, has been for me comparatively weak and
cold. These volumes and the tall entrancing folios of Nash's
lithographed Mansions of England in the Olden Time formed a store
lending itself particularly to distribution on the drawingroom carpet,
with concomitant pressure to the same surface of the small student's
stomach and relieving agitation of his backward heels. I make out that
it had decidedly been given to Mlle. Delavigne to represent to my first
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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