The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) by Mary McCarthy Page A

cantonal prejudice (unconscious) against the French of Paris or even that of Marseilles, so that he had introduced into his division a veritable babel of accents. As assistants and colleagues in French, he had had at various times a Belgian, a German, a Corsican, another Swiss, an Egyptian (who, as he confided to Mrs. Fortune, spoke French “like a native”); this year, under him, were Domna Rejnev, a Russian, and a half-American Turk whom he had met in Istanbul, a Mr. Mahmoud Ali Jones, a tall, stiff, bearded man with a queer rigid gait who resembled a flat Christ in a primitive, under Byzantine influence, and who was thought by some, for this reason, to be an international criminal. Aristide’s taste for colonial or, as it were, secondary sources of a language extended also to German, which was taught by himself and an Austrian, and to Spanish, by a girl from Peru.
    The fact was, Aristide Poncy was a good and innocent man—the father of three little Poncys who all took piano-lessons—whose shrewdness and knowledge of the world applied only to money-matters at home and to the exchange of currency in foreign countries. He had been guilty, as he once confessed to Domna in an undertone, “of many grave mistakes in the judgment of character.” Whenever, during the summer, he took a party of students abroad under his genial wing, catastrophic events attended him. As he sat sipping his vermouth and introducing himself to tourists at the Flore or the Deux Magots, the boys and girls under his guidance were being robbed, eloping to Italy, losing their passports, slipping off to Monte Carlo, seeking out an abortionist, deciding to turn queer, cabling the decision to their parents, while he took out his watch and wondered why they were late in meeting him for the expedition to Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Returning home, usually minus one student at the very least, he always deprecated what had happened, remarking that there had been “a little mix-up” or that the Métro was confusing to foreigners.
    Was it, Domna Rejnev wondered, as she rapped sharply on the door of his office, this fatal gullibility that had drawn her to him now to unfold Mulcahy’s story, or was it rather his fatherly qualities, his tolerance, experience, and human kindness that made her fear him less at such a moment than she would have feared Howard Furness or Alma Fortune, both friends of the Mulcahys, where Aristide was not? Already, as she hurried through the building, she had begun to have the feeling that the tale she bore was incredible (which, of course, her training reassured her, did not make it any the less true), and she had commenced to rehearse in her own mind, her lips moving swiftly as she climbed the narrow stairs, certain little modifications and additions that would make the President’s guilt more evident to an a-political audience. For there was no doubt that, of all persons she could have chosen, Aristide Poncy was the least qualified to appreciate the nuances of the affair, so that even as she knocked, she hesitated, hearing her superior trill out, “Entrez,” with a wonderful, exhibition r that made her see already his large pink tongue soloing against his red mouth-roof and his large clean white teeth (Aristide spoke French virtuoso-style, like a demonstrator in a department store or a professional diver in slow motion, holding his mouth open to illustrate the mechanics of the production of the various dentals and alveolars). He rose from his desk to welcome her, a busy, energetic man as his office showed, book-lined from floor to ceiling, with a special section for magazines, French, Swiss, and German, and for journals of the trade, yet he was evidently, as he said, très content to see her, eager to show her a new volume on M. de Vogüé which he had just procured from his bookseller with the idea that it might interest her, très content, and, as always, full of restrained anticipation for the good gossip that would