The Parisians — Volume 04Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
General
The Parisians — Volume 04
Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
English fiction -- 19th century; Paris (France) -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
Graham Vane has been for some days in the apartment rented of M. Georges.
He takes it in the name of Mr. Lamb,--a name wisely chosen, less common
than Thompson and Smith, less likely to be supposed an assumed name, yet
common enough not to be able easily to trace it to any special family.
He appears, as he had proposed, in the character of an agent employed by
a solicitor in London to execute sundry commissions and to collect
certain outstanding debts. There is no need to mention the name of the
solicitor; if there were, he could give the name of his own solicitor,
to whose discretion he could trust implicitly. He dresses and acts up to
his assumed character with the skill of a man who, like the illustrious
Charles Fox, has, though in private representations, practised the stage-
play in which Demosthenes said the triple art of oratory consisted; who
has seen a great deal of the world, and has that adaptability of
intellect which knowledge of the world lends to one who is so thoroughly
in earnest as to his end that he agrees to be sportive as to his means.
The kind of language he employs when speaking English to Lebeau is that
suited to the role of a dapper young underling of vulgar mind habituated
to vulgar companionships. I feel it due, if not to Graham himself, at
least to the memory of the dignified orator whose name he inherits, so to
modify and soften the hardy style of that peculiar diction in which he
disguises his birth and disgraces his culture, that it is only here and
there that I can venture to indicate the general tone of it; but in order
to supply my deficiencies therein, the reader has only to call to mind
the forms of phraseology which polite novelists in vogue, especially
young-lady novelists, ascribe to well-born gentlemen, and more
emphatically to those in the higher ranks of the Peerage. No doubt
Graham, in his capacity of critic, had been compelled to read, in order
to review, those contributions to refined literature, and had
familiarized himself to a vein of conversation abounding with "swell" and
"stunner" and "awfully jolly," in its libel on manners and outrage on
taste.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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