After my return to Paris, I had taken lessons from an excellent
language teacher, Mademoiselle Guémain, an old maid who had for many
years taught French to Scandinavians, and for whom I wrote descriptions
and remarks on what I saw, to acquire practise in written expression.
She had known most of the principal Northerners who had visited Paris
during the last twenty years, had taught Magdalene Thoresen, amongst
others, when this latter as a young woman had stayed in Paris. She was
an excellent creature, an unusual woman, intellectual, sensitive, and
innocent, who made an unforgettable impression upon one. Besides the
appointed lesson-times, we sometimes talked for hours together. How sad
that the lives of such good and exceptional women should vanish and
disappear, without any special thanks given to them in their
life-times, and with no one of the many whom they have benefitted to
tell publicly of their value. She possessed all the refinement of the
French, together with the modesty of an old maid, was both personally
inexperienced, and by virtue of the much that she had seen, very
experienced in worldly things. I visited her again in 1889, after the
lapse of nineteen years, having learned her address through Jonas Lie
and his wife, who knew her. I found her older, but still more charming,
and touchingly humble. It cut me to the heart to hear her say: _"C'est
une vraie charité que vous me faites de venir me voir."_
Mlle. Guémain was profoundly affected, like everyone else, by what we
were daily passing through during this time of heavy strain. As a
woman, she was impressed most by the seriousness which had seized even
the most frivolous people, and by the patriotic enthusiasm which was
spreading in ever wider circles. She regarded it as deeper and stronger
than as a rule it was.