The Abbe defended his word, and for fully twenty minutes there was an
eager argument, people citing passages and derivations, and defining
shades of meaning with immense animation and brilliant wit, as I now
understand, though then it seemed to me a wearisome imbroglio about a
trifle. I did not know what real benefit was done by these
discussions in purifying the language from much that was coarse and
unrefined. Yes, and far more than the language, for Madame de
Rambouillet, using her great gifts as a holy trust for the good of
her neighbour, conferred no small benefit on her generation, nor is
that good even yet entirely vanished. Ah! If there were more women
like her, France and society would be very different.
When the discussion was subsiding, Mademoiselle d' Argennes came to
take me by the hand, and to present us to the queen of the salon.
'Here, my mother, are our Odoardo and Gildippe,' she said.
You remember, my children, that Odoardo and Gildippe are the names
bestowed by Tasso on the English married pair who went together on
the first crusade, and Gildippe continued to be my name in that
circle, my nom de Parnasse, as it was called--nay, Madame de
Montausieur still gives it to me.
The allusion was a fortunate one; it established a precedent, and,
besides, English people have always been supposed to be eccentric. I
am, however, doing the noble lady injustice. Arthenice, as she was
called by an anagram of her baptismal name of Catherine, was no blind
slave to the conventional.
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