Lady Barbarina, The Siege of London, An International Episode, and Other TalesJames, Henry
General
Lady Barbarina, The Siege of London, An International Episode, and Other Tales
James, Henry
England -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction; Europe -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
“Into some nice French family. That’s the only way to do—to go to some
place where you can talk. If you’re after Art you want to stick to the
galleries; you want to go right through the Louvre, room by room; you
want to take a room a day, or something of that sort. But if you want to
acquire French the thing is to look out for some family that has got—and
they mostly have—more of it than they’ve use for themselves. How _can_
they have use for so much as they seem to _have_ to have? They’ve got to
work it off. Well, they work it off on _you_. There are lots of them
that take you to board and teach you. My second cousin—that young lady I
told you about—she got in with a crowd like that, and they posted her
right up in three months. They just took her right in and let her have
it—the full force. That’s what they do to you; they set you right down
and they talk _at_ you. You’ve got to understand them or perish—so you
strike out in self-defence; you can’t help yourself. That family my
cousin was with has moved away somewhere, or I should try and get in with
them. They were real live people, that family; after she left my cousin
corresponded with them in French. You’ve got to do _that_ too, to make
much real head. But I mean to find some other crowd, if it takes a lot
of trouble!”
I listened to all this with great interest, and when he spoke about his
cousin I was on the point of turning around to ask him the address of the
family she was with; but the next moment he said they had moved away, so
I sat still. The other gentleman, however, didn’t seem to be affected in
the same way as I was.
“Well,” he said, “you may follow up that if you like; I mean to follow up
the pictures. I don’t believe there’s ever going to be any considerable
demand in the United States for French; but I can promise you that in
about ten years there’ll be a big demand for Art! And it won’t be
temporary either.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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