My grandmother alone found fault
with him for speaking a little too well, a little too much like a book,
for not using a vocabulary as natural as his loosely knotted Lavalliere
neckties, his short, straight, almost schoolboyish coat. She was
astonished, too, at the furious invective which he was always launching at
the aristocracy, at fashionable life, and 'snobbishness'--"undoubtedly,"
he would say, "the sin of which Saint Paul is thinking when he speaks of
the sin for which there is no forgiveness."
Worldly ambition was a thing which my grandmother was so little capable of
feeling, or indeed of understanding, that it seemed to her futile to apply
so much heat to its condemnation. Besides, she thought it in not very good
taste that M. Legrandin, whose sister was married to a country gentleman
of Lower Normandy near Balbec, should deliver himself of such violent
attacks upon the nobles, going so far as to blame the Revolution for not
having guillotined them all.
"Well met, my friends!" he would say as he came towards us. "You are lucky
to spend so much time here; to-morrow I have to go back to Paris, to
squeeze back into my niche.
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