I don't see why I should not,after all,use that expression,for it is the correlative of the term pension bourgeoise,employed by Balzac in the Pere Goriot.Do you remember the pension bourgeoise of Madame Vauquer nee de Conflans?But this establishment is not at all like that:and indeed it is not at all bourgeois;there is something distinguished,something aristocratic,about it.The Pension Vauquer was dark,brown,sordid,graisseuse;but this is in quite a different tone,with high,clear,lightly-draped windows,tender,subtle,almost morbid,colours,and furniture in elegant,studied,reed-like lines.Madame de Maisonrouge reminds me of Madame Hulot--do you remember "la belle Madame Hulot?"--in Les Barents Pauvres.She has a great charm;a little artificial,a little fatigued,with a little suggestion of hidden things in her life;but I have always been sensitive to the charm of fatigue,of duplicity.
I am rather disappointed,I confess,in the society I find here;it is not so local,so characteristic,as I could have desired.Indeed,to tell the truth,it is not local at all;but,on the other hand,it is cosmopolitan,and there is a great advantage in that.We are French,we are English,we are American,we are German;and,I believe,there are some Russians and Hungarians expected.I am much interested in the study of national types;in comparing,contrasting,seizing the strong points,the weak points,the point of view of each.It is interesting to shift one's point of view--to enter into strange,exotic ways of looking at life.
The American types here are not,I am sorry to say,so interesting as they might be,and,excepting myself;are exclusively feminine.We are THIN,my dear Harvard;we are pale,we are sharp.There is something meagre about us;our line is wanting in roundness,our composition in richness.We lack temperament;we don't know how to live;nous ne savons pas vivre,as they say here.The American temperament is represented (putting myself aside,and I often think that my temperament is not at all American)by a young girl and her mother,and another young girl without her mother--without her mother or any attendant or appendage whatever.These young girls are rather curious types;they have a certain interest,they have a certain grace,but they are disappointing too;they don't go far;they don't keep all they promise;they don't satisfy the imagination.They are cold,slim,sexless;the physique is not generous,not abundant;it is only the drapery,the skirts and furbelows (that is,I mean in the young lady who has her mother)that are abundant.They are very different:one of them all elegance,all expensiveness,with an air of high fashion,from New York;the other a plain,pure,clear-eyed,straight-waisted,straight-stepping maiden from the heart of New England.And yet they are very much alike too--more alike than they would care to think themselves for they eye each other with cold,mistrustful,deprecating looks.They are both specimens of the emancipated young American girl--practical,positive,passionless,subtle,and knowing,as you please,either too much or too little.
And yet,as I say,they have a certain stamp,a certain grace;I like to talk with them,to study them.
The fair New Yorker is,sometimes,very amusing;she asks me if every one in Boston talks like me--if every one is as "intellectual"as your poor correspondent.She is for ever throwing Boston up at me;I can't get rid of Boston.The other one rubs it into me too;but in a different way;she seems to feel about it as a good Mahommedan feels toward Mecca,and regards it as a kind of focus of light for the whole human race.Poor little Boston,what nonsense is talked in thy name!But this New England maiden is,in her way,a strange type:
she is travelling all over Europe alone--"to see it,"she says,"for herself."For herself!What can that stiff slim self of hers do with such sights,such visions!She looks at everything,goes everywhere,passes her way,with her clear quiet eyes wide open;
skirting the edge of obscene abysses without suspecting them;pushing through brambles without tearing her robe;exciting,without knowing it,the most injurious suspicions;and always holding her course,passionless,stainless,fearless,charmless!It is a little figure in which,after all,if you can get the right point of view,there is something rather striking.
By way of contrast,there is a lovely English girl,with eyes as shy as violets,and a voice as sweet!She has a sweet Gainsborough head,and a great Gainsborough hat,with a mighty plume in front of it,which makes a shadow over her quiet English eyes.Then she has a sage-green robe,"mystic,wonderful,"all embroidered with subtle devices and flowers,and birds of tender tint;very straight and tight in front,and adorned behind,along the spine,with large,strange,iridescent buttons.The revival of taste,of the sense of beauty,in England,interests me deeply;what is there in a simple row of spinal buttons to make one dream--to donnor a rever,as they say here?I think that a great aesthetic renascence is at hand,and that a great light will be kindled in England,for all the world to see.There are spirits there that I should like to commune with;I think they would understand me.
This gracious English maiden,with her clinging robes,her amulets and girdles,with something quaint and angular in her step,her carriage something mediaeval and Gothic,in the details of her person and dress,this lovely Evelyn Vane (isn't it a beautiful name?)is deeply,delightfully picturesque.She is much a woman--elle est bien femme,as they say here;simpler,softer,rounder,richer than the young girls I spoke of just now.Not much talk--a great,sweet silence.Then the violet eye--the very eye itself seems to blush;
the great shadowy hat,making the brow so quiet;the strange,clinging,clutching,pictured raiment!As I say,it is a very gracious,tender type.She has her brother with her,who is a beautiful,fair-haired,gray-eyed young Englishman.He is purely objective;and he,too,is very plastic.