h the
Comte d'Espagne, the black-whiskered cavalier already mentioned, beside
her. The Americans were prosing away about Jefferson and Adams; the
Belgians talked agriculture and genealogy; and the French collecting
into a group of their own, in which nearly all the pretty women joined,
discoursed the ballet, the Chambre, the court, the coulisses, the last
mode, and the last murder, and all in the same mirthful and lively tone.
And truly, let people condemn as they will this superficial style of
conversation, there is none equal to it; it avoids the prosaic flatness
of German, and the monotonous pertinacity of English, which seems more
to partake of the nature of discussion than dialogue. French chit-chat
takes a wider range--anecdotic, illustrative, and discursive by turns;
it deems nothing too light, nothing too weighty for its subject; it is a
gay butterfly, now floating with gilded wings above you, now tremulously
perched upon a leaf below, now sparkling in the sunbeam, now loitering
in the shade; embodying not only thought, but expression, it charms by
its style as well as by its matter. The language, too, suggests shades
and nuances of colouring that exist not in other tongues; you can give
to your canvas the precise tint you wish, for when mystery would prove
a merit, the equivoque is there ready to your hand--meaning so much, yet
asserting so little. For my part I should make my will in English; but
I'd rather make love in French.

While thus digressing, I have forgotten to mention that people are
running back and forward with bedroom candles; there is a confused hum
of _bonsoir_ on every side; and, with many a hope of a fine day for the
morrow, we separate for the night.

I lay awake some hours thinking of Laura, and then of the baronne--they
were both arch ones; the abbe too crossed my thoughts, and once or twice
the old colonel's roguish leer; but I slept soundly for all that, and
did not wake till eight o'clock the next morning. The silence of the
house struck me forcibly as I rubbed my eyes and looked about. Hang it,
thought I, have they gone off to the _chasse_ without me? I surely could
never have slept through the uproar of their trumpets. I drew aside
the window-curtains, and the mystery was solved: such rain never fell
before; the clouds, actually touching the tops of the beech-trees,
seemed to ooze and squash like squeezed sponges. The torrent came down
in that splashing stroke as if some force behind