"A LITTLE MORE BURGUNDY"
The month of January, 1853, had been as dreary as only a midwinter bit of Paris weather can be. The Christmas season came and went, and left me and my friend Pierce, two friendless students, rather more homesick than usual, and a little indisposed to confess the malady, or to talk of those we loved, three thousand miles away.
This special night of the 21st of January I sat with William Pierce in the second story of an ancient hotel, which for democratic convenience had been labeled 47 Rue St. Andre des Arts. The name of the street—like others in the pleasant, wicked old Latin quarter—has some relation to the scholastic history of the Sorbonne; but who were the great folks to whom, long ago, this gray house belonged, I never knew. It was, in my time, a hive of students, and, standing entre cour et jardin, had a fine air of protesting against the meager trades around it, and the base uses to which it had come at last.
I never before, or since, lived in so vast a room as this in which I spent the most of 1853. The lofty, half-domed ceiling over us was still festive with the tangled dance of nymphs and shepherds who began their revel when the naughty regent was in power. I used to wonder what strange and wicked things they must have seen; what quarrels, what loves, what partings.
Tall windows, with balconies set in lovely traceries of stone, looked out on the street; on the other side of the room a deep alcove held my bed. Successive economies had narrowed the broad chimney throat to limits penuriously proportioned to the price of fuel; but two pensive caryatides still upheld the carved mantel-shelf, over which drooped pendent rose-wreaths of marble, pipe-stained, wine-tinted, and chipped.
It was never warm in this great chamber; but on the night in question it was colder than was comfortable even for the warm blood of youth. Over the meager nest of a grate we two sat, striving to conjure up a blaze from reluctant wood and coal. And this was rather with the hope that the fire might put a soul of heat into our boiullotte and so give us material for a consolatory punch, than with any vain belief that we could ever be warmed again by what the French nation has agreed to consider a fire.
"Dismal, is n't it?" said Pierce.
"No," I returned, cheerfully, because now the bouillotte began, uneasily, to hop a little on the coals, as if nervous, and to puff and breathe out steam at intervals. Seeing this, Pierce, who was by nature a silent son of New England, got up, with no more words, and went over to the far corner, and presently said:
"Dame!"
Now dame is French, and has no harm in it, but is nearly as satisfactory as if it did not lack that final n, which makes the difference between mere Celtic impatience and English verbal iniquity.