“Good indeed! Do you drink the cup? In Italy we say a ‘caffs’, and we are not foolish enough to suppose that it means the coffee-house.”
“He will have the best of it! And the two ‘Savoyards’, how did you swallow them?”
“Soaked in my coffee, for they were not larger than these on your table.”
“And you call these ‘Savoyards’? Say biscuits.”
“In Italy, we call them ‘Savoyards’ because they were first invented in Savoy; and it is not my fault if you imagined that I had swallowed two of the porters to be found at the corner of the streets—big fellows whom you call in Paris Savoyards, although very often they have never been in Savoy.”
Her husband came in at that moment, and she lost no time in relating the whole of our conversation. He laughed heartily, but he said I was right. Her niece arrived a few minutes after; she was a young girl about fourteen years of age, reserved, modest, and very intelligent. I had given her five or six lessons in Italian, and as she was very fond of that language and studied diligently she was beginning to speak.
Wishing to pay me her compliments in Italian, she said to me,
“‘Signore, sono in cantata di vi Vader in bona salute’.”
“I thank you, mademoiselle; but to translate ‘I am enchanted’, you must say ‘ho pacer’, and for to see you, you must say ‘di vedervi’.”
“I thought, sir, that the ‘vi’ was to be placed before.”