the first words of French that I mastered, and the sensation I created when I, a very small boy, irrepressibly burst forth with my declaration:
"O Madam, kay voos aite bell!"
This was addressed across the friendly supper table to Madame de R., who with her husband, the well-known portrait-painter, was spending her honeymoon at Boulogne.
To Boulogne we too had gone, as people went then when they wanted a change of air, or as they go now to Africa or the antipodes.
On this occasion our party consisted of my parents, three sisters, myself, and an English nurse, who, from first to last, was unutterably shocked by what she called the outrageous proceedings of the foreigners, and by the fearful language that parrot used, who always gathered a little sympathetic crowd in front of the shell and wooden-spade shop.
My sisters had a French governess of the approved type.
"Maître Corbeau sur un arbre perché," she recited to me with conventional emphasis and genuine affectation. On such occasions I stood staring at her, surprised at the amount of mouth-twisting and wriggling it took to talk French. Then I tried to do as much, and said:
"Mayter Korbow sure unn ahber per Shay."