Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

Letters Written in France, in the Summer of 1790

London

Printed for T. Cadell

1790, 1794

"Their turn of expression is a dress that hangs so gracefully on gay ideas, that you are apt to suppose that wit, a quality parsimoniously distributed in other countries, is in France as common as the gift of speech."

In every country it is social pleasure that sheds the most delicious flowers which grow on the path of life; but in France she covers the whole way with roses, and the traveller can scarcely mark its ruggedness. Happy are a people, so fond of talking as the French, in possessing a language modelled to all the charming purposes of conversation. Their turn of expression is a dress that hangs so gracefully on gay ideas, that you are apt to suppose that wit, a quality parsimoniously distributed in other countries, is in France as common as the gift of speech. Perhaps that brilliant phraseology which dazzles a foreigner, may be familiar and common to a French ear: but how much ingenuity must we allow to a people who have formed a language, of which the common-place phrases give you the idea of wit!
(Letter XXIII, pp. 197-8; p. 141 in Broadview ed.)

Dress

Reading; text from Google Books. OCR typo caught and corrected by Andrew Dobson.

Seven entries in ESTC (1790, 1791, 1792, 1794, 1796).

See Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France, In the Summer of 1790, To a Friend in England; Containing Various Anecdotes Relative to the French Revolution; and Memoirs of Mons. and Madame De F----. (London: Printed for T. Cadell, 1790). <Link to ESTC><Link to ECCO>

Text drawn from fourth edition of 1794 <Link to Google Books>.

Reading Letters Written in France, eds. Neil Fraistat and Susan S. Lanser (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview: 2001).

07/12/2013