I give you carte
blanche then; you can even be impertinent if you like; I shall let
it pass and horribly spoil you. I speak as if I were a hundred years
old, you say? Well, I am, if you please; I was born before the
French Revolution. Ah, my dear, je viens de loin; I belong to the old,
old world. But it's not of that I want to talk; I want to talk about
the new. You must tell me more about America; you never tell me
enough. Here I've been since I was brought here as a helpless child,
and it's ridiculous, or rather it's scandalous, how little I know
about that splendid, dreadful, funny country- surely the greatest
and drollest of them all. There are a great many of us like that in
these parts, and I must say I think we're a wretched set of people.
You should live in your own land; whatever it may be you have your
natural place there. If we're not good Americans we're certainly
poor Europeans; we've no natural place here. We're mere parasites,
crawling over the surface; we haven't our feet in the soil. At least
one can know it and not have illusions. A woman perhaps can get on;
a woman, it seems to me, has no natural place anywhere; wherever she
finds herself she has to remain on the surface and, more or less, to
crawl.
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