The Over-Estimated Grisette

Again the double implicature. By who? Is the reciprocal self-autophoric pronoun to be explicated? We don't think so.

"The Over-estimated Grisette"

Being an excerpt from Chapter XV of Mark Twain's 1869 Innocents Abroad)



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"Ah, the grisettes! I had almost forgotten."

"They are another romantic fraud. They were (if you let the books of travel tell it) always so beautiful — so neat and trim, so graceful — so naive and trusting — so gentle, so winning — so faithful to their shop duties, so irresistible to buyers in their prattling importunity — so devoted to their poverty-stricken students of the Latin Quarter — so lighthearted and happy on their Sunday picnics in the suburbs — and oh, so charmingly, so delightfully immoral!"


"Stuff! For three or four days I was constantly saying."

"Quick, Ferguson! Is that a grisette?"


And he always said, "No."


"He comprehended at last that I wanted to see a grisette."

"Then he showed me dozensof them."

"They were like nearly all the Frenchwomen I ever saw — homely."

"They had large hands, large feet, large mouths; they had pug noses as a general thing, and moustaches that not even good breeding could overlook."

"They combed their hair straight back without parting; they were ill-shaped, they were not winning, they were not graceful".

-- but griceful rather. Why the Americans regard Twain as the epitome of wit escapes me.

"I knew by their looks that they ate garlic and onions; and lastly and finally, to my thinking it would be base flattery to call them immoral."

"Aroint thee, wench! I sorrow for the vagabond student of the Latin Quarter now, even more than formerly I envied him. Thus topples to earth another idol of my infancy."

Indeed.