Poor Fred! He was not making much progress among the young girls. Almost everything people talked about outside his cadet life was unknown to him; what he could talk about seemed to have no interest for any one, unless indeed it might interest Giselle, who was an adept in the art of sympathetic listening, never having herself anything to say.
Besides this, Fred was by no means at his ease in talking to Jacqueline. They had been told not to 'tutoyer' each other, because they were getting too old for such familiarity, and it was he, and not she, who remembered this prohibition. Jacqueline perceived this after a while, and burst out laughing:
"Tiens! You call me 'you,"' she cried, "and I ought not to say 'thou' but 'you.' I forgot. It seems so odd, when we have always been accustomed to 'tutoyer' each other."
"One ought to give it up after one's first communion," said the eldest Mademoiselle Wermant, sententiously. "We ceased to 'tutoyer' our boy cousins after that. I am told nothing annoys a husband so much as to see these little familiarities between his wife and her cousins or her playmates."
Giselle looked very much astonished at this speech, and her air of disapproval amused Belle and Yvonne exceedingly. They began presently to talk of the classes in which they were considered brilliant pupils, and of their success in compositions. They said that sometimes very difficult subjects were given out. A week or two before, each had had to compose a letter purporting to be from Dante in exile to a friend in Florence, describing Paris as it was in his time, especially the manners and customs of its universities, ending by some allusion to the state of matters between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.
"Good heavens! And could you do it?" said Giselle, whose knowledge of history was limited to what may be found in school abridgments.
It was therefore a great satisfaction to her when Fred declared that he never should have known how to set about it.
"Oh! papa helped me a little," said Isabelle, whose father wrote articles much appreciated by the public in the 'Revue des Deux Mondes.' "But he said at the same time that it was horrid to give such crack- brained stuff to us poor girls. Happily, our subject this week is much nicer. We have to make comparisons between La Tristesse d'Olympio, Souvenir, and Le Lac'. That will be something interesting."
"The Tristesse d'Olympio?" repeated Giselle, in a tone of interrogation.
"You know, of course, that it is Victor Hugo's," said Mademoiselle de
Wermant, with a touch of pity.