A COUNTERCHANGE


"Il s'est trompe de defunte." The writer of this phrase had his sense of
that portly manner of French, and his burlesque is fine; but--the paradox
must be risked--because he was French he was not able to possess all its
grotesque mediocrity to the full; that is reserved for the English
reader. The words are in the mouth of a widower who, approaching his
wife's tomb, perceives there another "monsieur." "Monsieur," again; the
French reader is deprived of the value of this word, too, in its place;
it says little or nothing to him, whereas the Englishman, who has no word
of the precise bourgeois significance that it sometimes bears, but who
must use one of two English words of different allusion--man or I
gentleman--knows the exact value of its commonplace. The serious
Parisian, then, sees "un autre monsieur;" as it proves anon, there had
been a divorce in the history of the lady, but the later widower is not
yet aware of this, and explains to himself the presence of "un monsieur"
in his own place by that weighty phrase, "Il s'est trompe de defunte."

The strange effect of a thing so charged with allusion and with national
character is to cause an English reader to pity the mocking author who
was debarred by his own language from possessing the whole of his own
comedy. It is, in fact, by contrast with his English that an Englishman
does possess it. Your official, your professional Parisian has a
vocabulary of enormous, unrivalled mediocrity. When the novelist
perceives this he does not perceive it all, because some of the words are
the only words in use. Take an author at his serious moments, when he is
not at all occupied with the comedy of phrases, and he now and then
touches a word that has its burlesque by mere contrast with English.