The French forms used in writing to ladies are still more severe. “How would you begin a letter to Madame L——?” I asked a French gentleman who is a model of accuracy in etiquette:—
“Well, in the first place, I should never presume to write to Madame L—— at all.”
“But if circumstances made it imperative that you should write to her?”
“In that case I should address her as Madame, simply, and at the close of the letter beg her to accept mes hommages respectueux.”
Perhaps the reader imagines that the lady was a distant acquaintance; no, she was the wife of a most intimate friend, and the two families met very frequently. In this case the point of interest is that the lady would have been addressed as a stranger from a want of flexibility in the French forms.
There is a Frenchman who receives me with the utmost kindness and cordiality whenever I visit his neighbourhood. We correspond occasionally, and his letters begin “Monsieur” just as if he had never seen me, ending with the expression of his “sentiments respectueux.”
A very intimate friend in France will begin a letter with Mon cher Ami. I have only known three Frenchmen who used that form of address to myself. Two or three others would begin Cher Monsieur et Ami, mingling the formal with the affectionate. Englishmen hardly ever write My dear Friend; that is now an American form.
French Ceremony.
The French tendency to be ceremonious is not confined to letter-writing. It comes upon French people in personal intercourse in a curiously occasional way. I remember a physician, now dead, who had excellent French manners of the old school. He talked with great ease and without the least affectation, but on all those little occasions when a Frenchman feels bound to be ceremonious he was so in the supreme degree. After talking quite easily and intimately with some lady whom he had known for many years, he would rise to take leave with graceful old-fashioned attitudes and phrases, as if she were far his superior in rank and he had spoken to her for the first time.
Old-fashioned French Manners.