Explore "La Tristesse" by Marjorie Pickthall on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
This is not really the story of a child, though it began when Hypolite caught the measles at dancing-class. And when he was getting better, his uncle, who kept a business-like eye upon his health and his manners, sent him to Madame Dulac at Saint Jacques de Kilkenny, to grow strong in the air of the hills.
Hypolite was a little boy at the time, quiet and brown, with eyes like bronze-purple pansies. It was not his fault that his surname was Gibbs. Even at that age, he preferred to have it ignored. Madame called him "M'sieur Hypolite," or "le petit sieur. " But then, Madame had served and loved his mother when that mother was Geneviève de Lempriere, before she married Anthony Gibbs, and before Hypolite was born, or Madame herself took boarders. To Hypolite, two white shafts in a cemetery outside Montreal represented that ill-sorted father and mother. But before he had been a week in the village, his French began to return to him.