“Could it be, is it then posseeble that I have the plaisir to look at
Mees Feere?” It could be none other than Monsieur de l’Orme. He
indeed it was, as large, or rather as small as life, got up in what he
considered a perfectly unexceptionable English costume, the details of
which can be better imagined than described. Poor little man! He was so
inexpressibly delighted with himself and every one else, that his gaiety
was infectious.
Marion greeted him cordially.
“For it is just possible,” thought she, “that through him I may hear
something, however little, of him who is never really absent from my
thoughts.”
But it was not so. The little Frenchman had left Altes soon after Mrs.
Archer’s departure, and since then had been wandering to and fro, now at
last finding himself at the summit or his desires, a visitor in “le pays
charmant d’Angleterre.”
His account of his travels was very amusing, only he was so dreadfully
polite about everything.
London he had found “manifique, tout ce qu’il y a de plus beau,” but
“triste, vairee triste, surtout le Dimanche.” “Laysteer Squarr,” had
not, he confessed, quite come up to his ideal of the much vaunted
comfort Anglais, and the cab fares had struck him as slightly
exorbitant, not being accustomed in France to pay something extra to the
driver over and above the five itself, as he found was always expected
by London cabbies.
“But my dear Monsieur,” broke in Harry at this point, “you must have
been regularly done. I declare it’s a national disgrace to treat
strangers so!”
M. de l’Orme looked puzzled.
“Pardon,” he exclaimed, “I do not quite at all onderstand. Monsieur say,
I have been ‘donne.’ Donne? I request tousand forgives. That I am then
beast! Mais ‘donne.’ C’est bien ‘fini,’ ‘achevé,’ que Monsieur veut
dire?”
“Oh, no,” said Harry bluntly, “not that at all. Done means cheated,
taken in. You understand now? I meant that the cabbies had been cheating
you, in other words ‘doing you,’ and uncommonly brown too,” he added in
a lower voice.
“Harry!” said Marion in a tone of remonstrance.
But M. de l’Orme was really too irresistible, and Harry after all only a
schoolboy.
They took the little man a walk (Harry worse confounding his confusion
by offering to put him in the way of “doing” Brighton), exhibiting to
him the beauties of this London-super-mare, with which kind attention
he was so charmed, as to be rather at a loss for sufficiently effusive
expressions in English, and obliged consequently to fall back upon his
native tongue.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account