"Good luck with that." Charles set down the other boxes beside the first, not atop it, because the top one had been the smallest. "You'll have to find Henry first. And getting Camilla's attention isn't hard but try keeping it long enough for a decent conversation." Why, yes, Charles was a little out of sorts. "I'm not going to run around the rest of the school for her, either," he decided. "She can just bring Richard his present herself, when she's done, or get Henry to do it. That'd be something to see, wouldn't it?"
With unconscious presumption -- never shy about making himself at home, if the home belonged to Francis -- Charles sat on the desk itself next to the boxes, picking up Francis's letter-in-progress so as not to sit on it. "Doing some homework?" Of course he didn't have the slightest compunction about reading something that wasn't his, though he might have shown a little restraint had he realized ahead of time what the 'homework' actually was.
"Oh," he said, after a pause. For an awful moment it seemed Charles might make some light remark, something terribly careless and callous. The corner of his mouth had lifted in that wry little way the twins shared.
Instead all he said was, "You ought to put some French in it. You know, something pretty, a couple lines of Verlaine maybe. Tout suffocant et blême, quand sonne l'heure, je me souviens des jours anciens et je pleure ... (http://www.toutelapoesie.com/poemes/verlaine/poemes_saturniens/paysages_tristes/chanson_d_automne.htm) ... Something like that." His French was as good as Camilla's, not as good as Francis's own; the words had a sterile classroom accent, a little too perfect for fluency; but he seemed to feel comfortable with the language, and as he reeled off those remembered lines his pale features took on a sort of faraway look (probably envisioning the page of text in his mind, maybe thinking of a time he'd mooned over it himself), faraway and dreamy, the letter dangling carelessly from his fingers.
(( From the poem 'Chanson d'Automne' (Song of Autumn); translation can be had at Project Gutenberg (http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/gutenberg/etext05/8pvrl10h.htm), God love it. Of course Charles isn't thinking about Verlaine's affair with Rimbaud while he mentions this -- thoughtless thing that he is. Also, edited because at first I was using a different poem that I don't think works as well as this. ))
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2007-12-28 06:18 pm (UTC)With unconscious presumption -- never shy about making himself at home, if the home belonged to Francis -- Charles sat on the desk itself next to the boxes, picking up Francis's letter-in-progress so as not to sit on it. "Doing some homework?" Of course he didn't have the slightest compunction about reading something that wasn't his, though he might have shown a little restraint had he realized ahead of time what the 'homework' actually was.
"Oh," he said, after a pause. For an awful moment it seemed Charles might make some light remark, something terribly careless and callous. The corner of his mouth had lifted in that wry little way the twins shared.
Instead all he said was, "You ought to put some French in it. You know, something pretty, a couple lines of Verlaine maybe. Tout suffocant et blême, quand sonne l'heure, je me souviens des jours anciens et je pleure ... (http://www.toutelapoesie.com/poemes/verlaine/poemes_saturniens/paysages_tristes/chanson_d_automne.htm) ... Something like that." His French was as good as Camilla's, not as good as Francis's own; the words had a sterile classroom accent, a little too perfect for fluency; but he seemed to feel comfortable with the language, and as he reeled off those remembered lines his pale features took on a sort of faraway look (probably envisioning the page of text in his mind, maybe thinking of a time he'd mooned over it himself), faraway and dreamy, the letter dangling carelessly from his fingers.
(( From the poem 'Chanson d'Automne' (Song of Autumn); translation can be had at Project Gutenberg (http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/gutenberg/etext05/8pvrl10h.htm), God love it. Of course Charles isn't thinking about Verlaine's affair with Rimbaud while he mentions this -- thoughtless thing that he is. Also, edited because at first I was using a different poem that I don't think works as well as this. ))