"Ah! how are you, papa Dugrand?" he says, on encountering him. This apostrophe is, therefore, a mixture of surprise, soldierly bluntness and joviality.
At the first words I was stopped short by an almost insurmountable difficulty. This difficulty was all in my gesture. Do what I would, my manner of accosting papa Dugrand was grotesque; and all the lessons that were given me on that scene, all the pains I took to profit by those lessons, effected no change. I paced to and fro, saying and resaying the words: "How are you, papa Dugrand?" Another scholar in my place would have gone on; but the greater the difficulty seemed to me, the higher my ardor rose. However, I had my labor for my pains.
"That's not it," said my instructors. Good heavens! I knew that as well as they did; but what I did not know was why that was not it. It seems that my professors were equally ignorant, since they could not tell me exactly in what my way differed from theirs.
The specification of that difference would have enlightened me, but all remained, with them as with me, subject to the uncertain views of a vague instinct.
"Do as I do," they said to me, one after the other.
Zounds! the thing was easier said than done.
"Put more enthusiasm into your greeting to papa Dugrand!"
The greater my enthusiasm, the more laughable was my awkwardness.
"See here; watch my movements carefully!"
"I do watch, but I don't know how to go to work to imitate you; I don't seize the details of your gesture." (It varied with every repetition.) "I don't understand why your examples, with which I am satisfied, lead to nothing in me."