I grant that now and then I saw a Frenchman I’d call prettily turned, one who moved with grace. Some had generally good faces or fine hair, but most had bad limbs and were atrociously shaped, especially nobles and men born in Paris. Men from the provinces presented a better figure—the one I mistook for George had no foppishness of the city-bred nitwit in him. His gaze was serious and his posture defiant, nothing plump except the lips. George looked on you as suspect until you earned his respect. This was not caginess or unmerited suspicion but an aspect of his constant exercise of precise judgment.

I’ve forgiven my mother other things, even her cold treatment of Eliza which I regard as involuntary jealousy. But I do not forgive what she did to George. I specified in my will that he be bequeathed a thousand pounds, and she would not give it. She held on to my inheritance: George would have to wait for his portion until after she was dead. I cannot fathom her pettiness and I try to overlook it.

The man in Paris I mistook for George had his own reason for maintaining his figure—he was a prostitute—whereas George kept his shape out of that carefulness I found so lacking in city men, then and now.

—

I TRY TO AVOID WATCHING Montreal locals lounge in the undisciplined fashion that dispirits me so. Will a swim at the Y revive me? Should I attempt a half hour on the number four rowing machine, the only one I can fathom how to operate?

Sloth, everywhere! I saw the same in Blackheath and London, and remind myself it has less to do with the utter failure of the New World than with the difference between a soldier’s life and a civilian’s.

A young man, not seventeen, thrusts his cap out at the approach of an old woman walking with a cane. He possesses many times her agility yet demands her spare change.

She suffers a spinal curvature and hoists a dollar-store bag bulging with biscuits and oranges. She rummages as he waits, no shame in him at all, and he accepts her coins. She gives him a smile whose startling warmth glows, I think, from the false teeth you can get these days. I keep meaning to ask Sophie about the teeth. My mother would’ve loved them, and my own are in such hard shape.

“You remind me of my aunt Trudy,” says the beggar to the old woman.

“Do I?”

“You do! I don’t know why. She was a very kind person, too.”

He condescends as if he’s done the old woman some service instead of the other way around.