s visitors
in the country with a perpetual game of bowls, says to them: "Nous jouons
cinquante centimes--les benefices seront verses integralement a la
souscription qui est ouverte a la commune pour la construction de notre
maison d'ecole."

"Fletrir," again. Nothing could be more rhetorical than this perfectly
common word of controversy. The comic dramatist is well aware of the
spent violence of this phrase, with which every serious Frenchman will
reply to opponents, especially in public matters. But not even the comic
dramatist is aware of the last state of refuse commonplace that a word of
this kind represents. Refuse rhetoric, by the way, rather than Emerson's
"fossil poetry," would seem to be the right name for human language as
some of the processes of the several recent centuries have left it.

The French comedy, then, is fairly stuffed with thin-S for an Englishman.
They are not all, it is true, so finely comic as "Il s'est trompe de
defunte." In the report of that dull, incomparable sentence there is
enough humour, and subtle enough, for both the maker and the reader; for
the author who perceives the comedy as well as custom will permit, and
for the reader who takes it with the freshness of a stranger. But if not
so keen as this, the current word of French comedy is of the same quality
of language. When of the fourteen couples to be married by the mayor,
for instance, the deaf clerk has shuffled two, a looker-on pronounces:
"Il s'est empetre dans les futurs." But for a reader who has a full
sense of the several languages that exist in English at the service of
the several ways of human life, there is, from the mere terminology of
official France, high or low--daily France--a gratuitous and uncovenanted
smile to be had. With this the wit of the report of French literature
has not little to do. Nor is it in itself, perhaps, reasonably comic,
but the slightest irony of circumstance makes it so. A very little of
the mockery of conditions brings out all the latent absurdity of the
"sixieme et septieme arron-dissements," in the twinkling of an eye. So
is it with the mere "domicile;" with the aid of but a little of the
burlesque of life, the suit at law to "reintegrer le domicile conjugal"
becomes as grotesque as a phrase can make it. Even "a domicile"
merely--the word of every shopman--is, in the unconscious mouths of the
speakers, always awaiting the lightest touch of farce, if only an
Englishman hears