He looks more like an Englishman than a Frenchman; he is quite old, and I fancy older than he looks (he may be fifty). He is tall and dégagé, with a nice smile and pleasant eyes, though sometimes he gives you a sharp and suspicious glance. He speaks English very well. I told him (stretching a point) that I had never heard a foreigner speak such good English as he did.
He replied, without a blush: "I ought to speak it well. I learned it when
I was a child." And he added, complacently, "I can even write better than
I speak."
I asked him if he could write poetry in English.
He answered: "I do not think I could. My English goes just so far and no farther. I have what is strictly necessary, but not what is superfluous." ("J'ai, le stricte nécessaire, mais pas le superflu.")
"To make rhymes," said I, "I should think one would have to know every word in the dictionary."
"Oh!" he said, "I don't attempt rhymes; they are far beyond me."
When he talks French he is perfectly delightful. He creates the funniest words, and gives such an original turn to his phrases that you are—at least I was—on the qui vive not to lose anything he said. It is like listening to a person who, improvising on the piano, makes unexpected and subtle modulations which you hate to have escape you.
He told me he had been in correspondence with an English lady for over thirty years.
"Were you in love with her, that you wrote to her all those years?" I inquired.
"I was in love with her letters," he replied. "They were the cleverest things I ever read—full of wit and humor."