"un monsieur" in his own place by that
weighty phrase, "Il s'est trompé de défunte."

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 enor-
mous, unrivalled mediocrity. When the novel-
ist perceives this he does not perceive it all, be-
cause 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. "L'Histoire d'un Crime," of Victor Hugo
, has so many of these touches as to be,
by a kind of reflex action, a very school of Eng-
lish. The whole incident of the omnibus in that
grave work has unconscious international
comedy. The Deputies seated in the interior of
the omnibus had been, it will be remembered,
shut out of their Chamber by the perpetrator of
the Coup d'Etat, but each had his official
scarf. Scarf--pish!--"l'écharpe!" "Ceindre

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