[10] “Ça.” Note the peculiar character and value, in modern French, of this general and slightly depreciatory pronoun, essentially a republican word,—hurried, inconsiderate, and insolent. The popular chant ‘ça ira’ gives the typical power. [↑]
[11] “C’est seulement pour dire.” I’ve been at least ten minutes trying to translate it, and can’t. [↑]
[12] “On est toujours homme.” The proverb is frequent among the French and Germans. The modesty of it is not altogether easy to an English mind, and would be totally incomprehensible to an ordinary Scotch one. [↑]
[13] “Assez brave.” Untranslateable, except by the old English sense of the word brave, and even that has more reference to outside show than the French word. [↑]
[14] You are to note carefully the conditions of sentiment in family relationships implied both here, and in the bride’s reference, farther on, to her godmother’s children. Poverty, with St. Francis’ pardon, is not always holy in its influence: yet a richer girl might have felt exactly the same, without being innocent enough to say so. [↑]
[15] I believe the reverend and excellent novelist would himself authorize the distinction; but Hansli’s mother must be answerable for it to my Evangelical readers. [↑]
[16] “Poêle a frire.” I don’t quite understand the nature of this article. [↑]
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER XL.
I am obliged to go to Italy this spring, and find beside me, a mass of Fors material in arrear, needing various explanation and arrangement, for which I have no time. Fors herself must look to it, and my readers use their own wits in thinking over what she has looked to. I begin with a piece of Marmontel, which was meant to follow, ‘in due time,’ the twenty-first letter,—of which, please glance at the last four pages again. This following bit is from another story professing to give some account of Molière’s Misanthrope, in his country life, after his last quarrel with Celimène. He calls on a country gentleman, M. de Laval, “and was received by him with the simple and serious courtesy which announces neither the need nor the vain desire of making new connections. Behold, said he, a man who does not surrender himself at once. I esteem him the more. He congratulated M. de Laval [[74]]on the agreeableness of his solitude. You come to live here, he said to him, far from men, and you are very right to avoid them.