In Madeira Place | Page 7

was a
lofty contest; but I had time then. I found a little amusement in the case,
and I had the advantage of two or three hours in all of practical French
conversation with men thoroughly in earnest. Finally, I had the
satisfaction of settling their dispute, and so keeping them from a
quarrel.
Then there was a French cook, out of a job, who wanted me to find him
a place. He was gathering mushrooms, meanwhile, for the hotels. One
day he surprised me by coming into my office in a white linen cap,
brandishing in his hand a long, gleaming knife. He only desired,
however, to tell me that he had found a place at one of the clubs, and to
show, in his pride, the shining blade which he had just bought as his
equipment.
But the man who impressed me most, after Sorel, was Carron. He first
appeared as the friend of the cook,--whom he introduced to me, with
many flourishes and compliments, although he was an utter stranger
himself. Carron was a well-built and rather handsome man, of medium
height, and was then perhaps fifty years of age. He had a remarkably
bright, intelligent face, curling brown hair, and a full, wavy brown
beard. He kept a rival boarding-house, not far from Sorel's, in a gabled

wooden house two hundred years old, which was anciently the home of
an eminent Puritan divine. In the oak-panelled room where the
theologian wrote his famous tract upon the Carpenter who Profanely
undertook to Dispense the Word in the way of Public Ministration, and
was Divinely struck Dumb in consequence, Carron now sold beer from
a keg.
It was plain at a glance that his present was not of a piece with his past
I could not place him. His manners were easy and agreeable, and yet he
was not a gentleman. He was well informed, and evidently of some
mental training, and yet he was not quite an educated man. After his
first visit to me, with the cook, he, too, occasionally looked in upon me,
generally late in the afternoon, when I could call the day's work done
and could talk French for half an hour with him, in place of taking a
walk. He was strongly dramatic, like Sorel, but in a different way. Sorel
was intense; Carron was théâtral. He was very fond of declamation;
and seeing from the first my wish to learn French,--which Sorel would
never very definitely recognize,--he often recited to me, for ear practice,
and in an exceedingly effective way, passages from the Old Testament.
He seemed to know the Psalms by heart. He was a good deal of an
actor, and he took the part of a Hebrew prophet with great effect. But
his fervor was all stage fire, and he would turn in an instant from a
denunciatory Psalm to a humorous story. Even his stories were of a
religious cast, like those which ministers relate when they gather
socially. He told me once about a priest who was strolling along the
bank of the Loire, when a drunken sailor accosted him and reviled him
as a lazy good-for-nothing, a fainéant, and slapped his face. The priest
only turned the other cheek to him. "Strike again," he said; and the
sailor struck. "Now, my friend," said the priest, "the Scripture tells us
that when one strikes us we are to turn the other cheek. There it ends its
instruction and leaves us to follow our own judgment." Whereupon,
being a powerful man, he collared the sailor and plunged him into the
water. He told me, too, with great unction, and with a roguish gleam in
his eye, a story of a small child who was directed to prepare herself for
confession, and, being given a manual for self-examination, found the
wrong places, and appeared with this array of sins: "I have been
unfaithful to my marriage vows.... I have not made the tour of my

diocese."
Carron had an Irish wife (une Irlandaise), much younger than he,
whom he worshipped. He told me, one day, about his courtship. When
he first met her, she knew not a word of French, and he not a word of
English. He was greatly captivated (épris), and he had to contrive some
mode of communication. They were both Catholics. He had a
prayer-book with Latin and French in parallel columns; she had a
similar prayer-book but in Latin and English. They would seat
themselves; Carron would find in his prayer-book a sentence in French
which would suit his turn, on a pinch, and through the medium of the
Latin would find the corresponding passage in English in Norah's
prayer-book and point it out to her. Norah, in her turn, would select and
point out some