One evening in September of last year, on entering our salle-à—manger, we beheld a stranger, an addition to our ranks; and Madame, with a comprehensive gesture, introduced her to us in these terms: “Une nouvelle, une anglaise, Mees,...” Then she made awful hash of rather a long-winded English name: and we were content to accept the newcomer simply as Miss. The concierge and the servants, though, (to anticipate a little), treated Miss as a petit-nom, like Jane or Susan, and prefixed the title Mademoiselle. The pleonasm seemed a happy one, and we took it up: Mademoiselle Miss. On her visiting-card the legend ran, “Miss Edith Thorowether.” It was probably as well, on the whole, that French lips should not too frequently have tackled that.
Now if she had been plain or elderly or constrained in her bearing or ill-natured-looking, no doubt we should have felt at once the difference between her and ourselves, and understood her presence with us as merely the outward and visible sign of some inward and spiritual blunder. But, as it happened, she was young and distinctly pretty; and she appeared to be entirely at her ease; and she smiled graciously in acknowledgment of the somewhat cursory nods with which we favoured her. We hadn’t the wit or the intuitions to recognise her ease for the ease of innocence; and our hotel was such a risky box; and ladies of English or American origin were no especial novelty in the Quarter; and we didn’t stop to examine this one critically, or to consider; and so things fell out in a way we now find disagreeable to remember. It was Saul who had strayed by hazard into the midst of our prophetic councils; and we mistook him for one of our own prophetic caste, and proceeded to demean and express ourselves in our usual prophetic manner. Fortunately, Saul’s knowledge of our prophetic tongue was limited. We spoke the slang of the Boulevards; whilst the little French that Mademoiselle Miss was mistress of she had learned from Ollendorf and Corinne.
The situation was partially cleared up, I forget how long afterwards, by our discovering in her room, whither she had bidden us for an evening’s entertainment, an ancient copy of a certain Handbook to Paris,—“the badge of all our tribe,” as the tourist called it. On opening to its list of hotels (which somebody did by chance), we found the following note, with a pencil-mark against it: “Hotel de l’.céan et de Shake-spere, Rue Racine, chiefly frequented by visitors pursuing art-studies: well spoken-of and inexpensive.” That explained it. Mademoiselle Miss had trusted to a guide that was ten years behind the times: so the date on the title-page attested. And in ten years how had the Hôtel de l’.céan et de Shake-spere fallen from its respectable estate!—unless, ten years ago, the editor of that most exemplary handbook had been egregiously imposed upon. In his current edition the paragraph that I have cited does not appear.