'Then the tutoyer is a nuance that you want. When husband and wife are talking together they pass insensibly, twenty times perhaps in an hour, from the vous to the tu. When matters of business or of serious discussion are introduced, indeed whenever the affections are not concerned, it is vous. With the least soupçon of tenderness the tu returns.'
'Yet,' I said, 'you never use the tu before a third person.'
'Never,' he answered, 'in good company. Among the bourgeoisie always. It is odd that an aristocratic form, so easily learned, should not have been adopted by all who pretend to be gentry. I remember being present when an Englishman and his wife, much accustomed to good French society, but unacquainted with this nuance, were laboriously tutoyering each other. I relieved them much by assuring them that it was not merely unnecessary, but objectionable.'
May 2.—Tocqueville dined with us.
A lady at the table d'hôte was full of a sermon which she had heard at the Madeleine. The preacher said, sinking his voice to an audible whisper, 'I will tell you a secret, but it must go no farther. There is more religion among the Protestants than with us, they are better acquainted with the Bible, and make more use of their reading: we have much to learn from them.'
I asked Tocqueville, when we were in our own room, as to the feelings of the religious world in France with respect to heretics.
'The religious laity,' he answered, 'have probably little opinion on the subject. They suppose the heretic to be less favourably situated than themselves, but do not waste much thought upon him. The ignorant priests of course consign him to perdition. The better instructed think, like Protestants, that error is dangerous only so far as it influences practice.
'Dr. Bretonneau, at Tours, was one of the best men that I have known, but an unbeliever. The archbishop tried in his last illness to reconcile him to the Church: Bretonneau died as he had lived. But the archbishop, when lamenting to me his death, expressed his own conviction that so excellent a soul could not perish.
'You recollect the duchesse in St.-Simon, who, on the death of a sinner of illustrious race, said, "On me dira ce qu'on voudra, on ne me persuadera pas que Dieu n'y regarde deux fois avant de damner un homme de sa qualité." The archbishop's feeling was the same, only changing qualité into virtue.
'There is something amusing,' he continued, 'when, separated as we are from it by such a chasm, we look back on the prejudices of the Ancien Régime. An old lady once said to me, "I have been reading with great satisfaction the genealogies which prove that Jesus Christ descended from David. Ça montre que notre Seigneur était Gentilhomme."'