“No, I won’t damn French,” said his friend. “I’ll acquire it—that’s what I’ll do with it. I’ll go right into a family.”
“What family’ll you go into?”
“Into some nice French family. That’s the only way to do—to go to some place where you can talk. If you’re after Art you want to stick to the galleries; you want to go right through the Louvre, room by room; you want to take a room a day, or something of that sort. But if you want to acquire French the thing is to look out for some family that has got—and they mostly have—more of it than they’ve use for themselves. How can they have use for so much as they seem to have to have? They’ve got to work it off. Well, they work it off on you. There are lots of them that take you to board and teach you. My second cousin—that young lady I told you about—she got in with a crowd like that, and they posted her right up in three months. They just took her right in and let her have it—the full force. That’s what they do to you; they set you right down and they talk at you. You’ve got to understand them or perish—so you strike out in self-defence; you can’t help yourself. That family my cousin was with has moved away somewhere, or I should try and get in with them. They were real live people, that family; after she left my cousin corresponded with them in French. You’ve got to do that too, to make much real head. But I mean to find some other crowd, if it takes a lot of trouble!”
I listened to all this with great interest, and when he spoke about his cousin I was on the point of turning around to ask him the address of the family she was with; but the next moment he said they had moved away, so I sat still. The other gentleman, however, didn’t seem to be affected in the same way as I was.
“Well,” he said, “you may follow up that if you like; I mean to follow up the pictures. I don’t believe there’s ever going to be any considerable demand in the United States for French; but I can promise you that in about ten years there’ll be a big demand for Art! And it won’t be temporary either.”
That remark may be very true, but I don’t care anything about the demand; I want to know French for its own sake. “Art for art,” they say; but I say French for French. I don’t want to think I’ve been all this while without having gained an insight. . . . The very next day, I asked the lady who kept the books at the hotel whether she knew of any family that could take me to board and give me the benefit of their conversation. She instantly threw up her hands with little shrill cries—in their wonderful French way, you know—and told me that her dearest friend kept a regular place of that kind. If she had known I was looking out for such a place she would have told me before; she hadn’t spoken of it herself because she didn’t wish to injure the hotel by working me off on another house. She told me this was a charming family who had often received American ladies—and others, including three Tahitans—who wished to follow up the language, and she was sure I’d fall in love with them. So she gave me their address and offered to go with me to introduce me. But I was in such a hurry that I went off by myself and soon found them all right. They were sitting there as if they kind of expected me, and wouldn’t scarcely let me come round again for my baggage. They seemed to have right there on hand, as those gentlemen of the theatre said, plenty of what I was after, and I now feel there’ll be no trouble about that.
I came here to stay about three days ago, and by this time I’ve quite worked in. The price of board struck me as rather high, but I must remember what a chance to press onward it includes. I’ve a very pretty little room—without any carpet, but with seven mirrors, two clocks and five curtains. I was rather disappointed, however, after I arrived, to find that there are several other Americans here—all also bent on pressing onward. At least there are three American and two English pensioners, as they call them, as well as a German gentleman—and there seems nothing backward about him. I shouldn’t wonder if we’d make a regular class, with “moving up” and moving down; anyhow I guess I won’t be at the foot, but I’ve not yet time to judge. I try to talk with Madame de Maisonrouge all I can—she’s the lady of the house, and the real family consists only of herself and her two daughters. They’re bright enough to give points to our own brightest, and I guess we’ll become quite intimate. I’ll write you more about everything in my next. Tell William Platt I don’t care a speck what he does.
III
FROM MISS VIOLET RAY IN PARIS TO MISS AGNES RICH IN NEW YORK
September 21.
We had hardly got here when father received a telegram saying he would have to come right back to New York. It was for something about his business—I don’t know exactly what; you know I never understand those things and never want to. We had just got settled at the hotel, in some charming rooms, and mother and I, as you may imagine, were greatly annoyed. Father’s extremely fussy, as you know, and his first idea, as soon as he found he should have to go back, was that we should go back with him. He declared he’d never leave us in Paris alone and that we must return and come out again. I don’t know what he thought would happen to us; I suppose he thought we should be too extravagant. It’s father’s theory that we’re always running-up bills, whereas a little observation would show him that we wear the same old rags for months. But father has no observation; he has nothing but blind theories. Mother and I, however, have fortunately a great deal of practice, and we succeeded in making him understand that we wouldn’t budge from Paris and that we’d rather be chopped into small pieces than cross that squalid sea again. So at last he decided to go back alone and to leave us here for three months. Only, to show you how fussy he is, he refused to let us stay at the hotel and insisted that we should go into a family. I don’t know what put such an idea into his head unless it was some advertisement that he saw in one of the American papers that are published here. Don’t think you can escape from them anywhere.