MY FRENCH.
Oh, that lesson of French! Two seats at the snug little writing-table, and only one witness of my blunders; for nobody ever thought of coming into the drawing-room before the breakfast-bell. Unfortunately for me, Ollendorff had not yet published his thefts from Manesca; and instead of that brisk little war of question and answer, which loosens the tongue so readily to strange sounds and forms the memory so promptly to the combinations of a new idiom, I had to struggle on through the scanty rules and multitudinous exceptions of grammar, and pick my way with the help of a dictionary through the harmonious sentences of "Télémaque." And never had sentences seemed so harmonious to my ears before; and never, I fear, before had my young friend's patience been so sorely tried, or her love of fun put under so unnatural a restraint. "Calypso ne pouvait se consoler," over and over and over again, her rosy lips moving slowly in order to give distinctness to every articulation, and her blue eyes fairly dancing with repressed laughter at my awkward imitation. If my teacher's patience could have given me a good pronunciation, mine would have been perfect. Day after day she came back to her task, and ever as the clock told nine would meet me at the door with the same genial smile.
Nearly twenty years afterwards I found myself once more in Paris, and at a large party at the house of the American Minister, the late Mr. King. As I was wandering through the rooms, looking at group after group of unknown faces, my eye fell upon one that I should have recognized at once as that of my first teacher of French, if it had not seemed to me impossible that twenty years could have passed over it so lightly.
"Who is that lady?" I asked of a gentleman near me, whom it was impossible not to set down at once for an American.
"Why, that is Madame de ——, a grand-daughter of General Lafayette."
I can hardly account, at this quiet moment, for the sudden impulse that seized me; but resist it I could not; and walking directly up to her, I made my lowest bow, and, without giving her time to look me well in the face, repeated, with all the gravity I could command, "Calypso ne pouvait se consoler du départ d'Ulysse."
"O! Monsieur Greene," said she, holding out both her hands, "it must be you!"
THE GENERAL.
General Lafayette had just entered his seventy-first year. In his childhood he had been troubled by a weakness of the chest which gave his friends some anxiety. But his constitution was naturally good, and air, exercise, and exposure gradually wore away every trace of his original debility. In person he was tall and strongly built, with broad shoulders, large limbs, and a general air of strength, which was rather increased than diminished by an evident tending towards corpulency. While still a young man, his right leg—the same, I believe, that had been wounded in rallying our broken troops at the Brandywine—was fractured by a fall on the ice, leaving him lame for the rest of his days. This did not prevent him, however, from walking about his farm, though it cut him off from the use of the saddle, and gave a halt to his gait, which but for his dignity of carriage would have approached to awkwardness. Indeed, he had more dignity of bearing than any man I ever saw. And it was not merely the dignity of self-possession, which early familiarity with society and early habits of command may give even to an ordinary man, but that elevation of manner which springs from an habitual elevation of thought, bearing witness to the purity of its source, as a clear eye and ruddy cheek bear witness to the purity of the air you daily breathe. In some respects he was the mercurial Frenchman to the last day of his life; yet his general bearing, that in which he comes oftenest to my memory, was of calm earnestness, tempered and mellowed by quick sympathies.
His method of life was very regular,—the regularity of thirty years of comparative retirement, following close upon fifteen years of active public life, begun at twenty in the army of Washington, and ending in a Prussian and Austrian dungeon at thirty-five.