according to the happy conviction of the shops. To say "child" in
England is to say "fair-haired child," even as in Tuscany to say "young
man" is to say "tenor." "I have a little party to-night, eight or ten
tenors, from neighbouring palazzi, to meet my English friends."

But France is a greater enthusiast than our now country. The fairness
and the golden hair are here so much a matter of orthodoxy, that they are
not always mentioned; they are frequently taken for granted. Not so in
France; the French go out of their way to make the exceptional fairness
of their children the rule of their literature. No French child dare
show his face in a book--prose or poetry--without blue eyes and fair
hair. It is a thing about which the French child of real life can hardly
escape a certain sensitiveness. What, he may ask, is the use of being a
dark-haired child of fact, when all the emotion, all the innocence, all
the romance, are absorbed by the flaxen-haired child of fiction? How
deplorable that our mothers, the French infants may say, should have
their unattained ideals in the nurseries of the imagination; how dismal
that they should be perpetually disillusioned in the nurseries of fact!
Is there then no sentiment for us? they may ask. Will not convention,
which has been forced to restore the advantage to truth on so many other
points, be compelled to yield on this point also, and reconcile our aunts
to the family colouring?

All the schools of literature are in a tale. The classic masters,
needless to say, do not stoop to the colouring of boys and girls; but as
soon as the Romantiques arise, the cradle is there, and no soft hair ever
in it that is not of some tone of gold, no eyes that are not blue, and no
cheek that is not white and pink as milk and roses. Victor Hugo, who
discovered the child of modern poetry, never omits the touch of
description; the word _blond_ is as inevitable as any epithet marshalled