The Princess Casamassima

at effete things) and a theorist and an optimist and a visionary; he believed that the day was to come when all the nations of the earth would abolish their frontiers and armies and custom-houses, and embrace on both cheeks, and cover the globe with boulevards, ra­diating from Paris, where the human family would sit, in groups, at little tables, according to affi nities, drinking coffee (not tea, par ex- emple!) and listening to the music of the spheres. Mr Vetch neither prefi gured nor desired this organised felicity; he was fond of his cup of tea, and only wanted to see the British constitution a good deal simplifi ed; he thought it a much overrated system, but his heresies rubbed shoulders, sociably, with those of the little bookbinder, and his friend in Lisson Grove became for him the type of the intelli­gent foreigner whose conversation completes our culture. Poupin’s humanitary zeal was as unlimited as his English vocabulary was the reverse, and the new friends agreed with each other enough, and not too much, to discuss, which was much better than an unspeak­able harmony. On several other Sunday afternoons the fi ddler went back to Lisson Grove, and having, at his theatre, as a veteran, a faith­ful servant, an occasional privilege, he was able to carry thither, one day in the autumn, an order for two seats in the second balcony. Madame Poupin and her husband passed a lugubrious evening at the English comedy, where they didn’t understand a word that was spoken, and consoled themselves by gazing at their friend in the orchestra. But this adventure did not arrest the development of a friendship into which, eventually, Amanda Pynsent was drawn. Madame Poupin, among the cold insularies, lacked female society, and Mr Vetch proposed to his amiable friend in Lomax Place to call upon her. The little dressmaker, who in the course of her life had known no Frenchwoman but the unhappy Florentine (so favour­able a specimen till she began to go wrong), adopted his suggestion, in the hope that she should get a few ideas from a lady whose ap-

when, I say, he put the case before her with this cynical, ironical lucidity, she only sighed and said that all the money she had ever saved was ninety pounds, which, as he knew perfectly well, it would cost her his acquaintance for evermore to take out of the bank. The fi ddler had, in fact, declared to her in a manner not to be mistaken that if she should divest herself, on the boy’s account, of this sole nest-egg of her old age, he would wash his hands of her and her affairs. Her standard of success for Hyacinth was vague, save on one point, as regards which she was passionately, fi ercely fi rm; she was perfectly determined he should never go into a small shop. She would rather see him a bricklayer or a costermonger than dedicated to a retail business, tying up candles at a grocer’s, or giving change for a shilling across a counter. She would rather, she declared on one occasion, see him articled to a shoemaker or a tailor.

His staying away from his work was so rare that, in the after­noon, before he went home, Hyacinth walked to Lisson Grove to see what ailed him. He found his friend in bed, with a plaster on his chest, and Madame Poupin making tisane over the fi re. The French­man took his indisposition solemnly but resignedly, like a man who believed that all illness was owing to the imperfect organisation of society, and lay covered up to his chin, with a red cotton hand­kerchief bound round his head. Near his bed sat a visitor, a young man unknown to Hyacinth. Hyacinth, naturally, had never been to Paris, but he always supposed that the intйrieur of his friends in Lis­son Grove gave rather a vivid idea of that city. The two small rooms which constituted their establishment contained a great many mir­rors, as well as little portraits (old-fashioned prints) of revolution­ary heroes. The chimney-piece, in the bedroom, was muffl ed in some red drapery, which appeared to Hyacinth extraordinarily magnifi ­cent; the principal ornament of the salon was a group of small and highly-decorated cups, on a tray, accompanied by gilt bottles and glasses, the latter still more diminutive – the whole intended for

black coffee and liqueurs. There was no carpet on the fl oor, but rugs and mats, of various shapes and sizes, disposed themselves at the feet of the chairs and sofas; and in the sitting-room, where there was a wonderful gilt clock, of the Empire, surmounted with a ‘sub­ject’ representing Virtue receiving a crown of laurel from the hands of Faith, Madame Poupin, with the aid of a tiny stove, a handful of charcoal, and two or three saucepans, carried on a triumphant cui- sine. In the windows were curtains of white muslin, much fl uted and frilled, and tied with pink ribbon.

“Ah, yes; with their fi lthy politics the situation of the pauvre monde is the last thing they ever think of!” his wife exclaimed, from the fi re. “There are times when I ask myself how long it will go on.”

iarity with that prospect. It was the constant theme of his French friends, whom he had long since perceived to be in a state of chronic spiritual infl ammation. For them the social question was always in order, the political question always abhorrent, the disinherited al­ways present. He wondered at their zeal, their continuity, their vi­vacity, their incorruptibility; at the abundant supply of conviction and prophecy which they always had on hand. He believed that at bottom he was sorer than they, yet he had deviations and lapses, moments when the social question bored him and he forgot not only his own wrongs, which would have been pardonable, but those of the people at large, of his brothers and sisters in misery. They, however, were perpetually in the breach, and perpetually consistent with themselves and, what is more, with each other. Hyacinth had heard that the institution of marriage in France was rather lightly considered, but he was struck with the closeness and intimacy of the union in Lisson Grove, the passionate identity of interest: espe­cially on the day when M. Poupin informed him, in a moment of ex­treme but not indiscreet expansion, that the lady was his wife only in a spiritual, transcendental sense. There were hypocritical conces­sions and debasing superstitions of which this exalted pair wholly disapproved. Hyacinth knew their vocabulary by heart, and could have said everything, in the same words, that on any given occasion M. Poupin was likely to say. He knew that ‘they’, in their phraseol­ogy, was a comprehensive allusion to every one in the world but the people – though who, exactly, in their length and breadth, the people were was less defi nitely established. He himself was of this sacred body, for which the future was to have such compensations; and so, of course, were the Frenchman and his consort, and so was Pinnie, and so were most of the inhabitants of Lomax Place and the workmen in old Crookenden’s shop. But was old Crookenden himself, who wore an apron rather dirtier than the rest of them