After my return to Paris, I had taken lessons from an excellent language
teacher, Mademoiselle Guemain, 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.
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