That's what he's like, Frank, the David of Donatello," and he pulled his jowl, delighted to have found the painting word.
As soon as Emilienne saw that we were talking of the boy, her interest in the conversation vanished, even more quickly than her appetite.

She had to go, she said suddenly; she was so sorry, and the discontented curiosity of her look gave place again to the smirk of affected politeness.
"_Au revoir, n'est-ce pas?
a Charing Cross, n'est-ce-pas, Monsieur?
Vous ne m'oublierez pas ?..._" As we turned to walk along the boulevard I noticed that the boy, too, had disappeared.

The moonlight was playing with the leaves and boughs of the plane trees and throwing them in Japanese shadow-pictures on the pavement: I was given over to thought; evidently Oscar imagined I was offended, for he launched out into a panegyric on Paris.
"The most wonderful city in the world, the only civilised capital; the only place on earth where you find absolute toleration for all human frailties, with passionate admiration for all human virtues and capacities.
"Do you remember Verlaine, Frank?
His life was nameless and terrible, he did everything to excess, was drunken, dirty and debauched, and yet there he would sit in a cafe on the Boul' Mich', and everybody who came in would bow to him, and call him _maitre_ and be proud of any sign of recognition from him because he was a great poet.
"In England they would have murdered Verlaine, and men who call themselves gentlemen would have gone out of their way to insult him in public.

England is still only half-civilised; Englishmen touch life at one or two points without suspecting its complexity.

They are rude and harsh." All the while I could not help thinking of Dante and his condemnation of Florence, and its "hard, malignant people," the people who still had something in them of "the mountain and rock" of their birthplace:--"_E tiene ancor del monte e del macigno._" "You are not offended, Frank, are you, with me, for making you meet two caryatides of the Parisian temple of pleasure ?" "No, no," I cried, "I was thinking how Dante condemned Florence and its people, its ungrateful malignant people, and how when his teacher, Brunetto Latini, and his companions came to him in the underworld, he felt as if he, too, must throw himself into the pit with them.