Le Monsieur De La Petite Dame

By Frances Hodgson Burnett

Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett (24 November 1849 – 29 October 1924) was a British-American novelist and playwright. She is best known for the three children's novels Little Lord Fauntleroy (published in 1885–1886), A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1911).

Frances Eliza Hodgson was born in Cheetham, Manchester, England. After her father died in 1852, the family fell on straitened circumstances and in 1865 immigrated to the United States, settling near Knoxville, Tennessee. There Frances began writing to help earn money for the family, publishing stories in magazines from the age of 19. In 1870, her mother died, and in 1872 Frances married Swan Burnett, who became a medical doctor. The Burnetts lived for two years in Paris, where their two sons were born, before returning to the United States to live in Washington, D.C., Burnett then began to write novels, the first of which (That Lass o' Lowrie's), was published to good reviews. Little Lord Fauntleroy was published in 1886 and made her a popular writer of children's fiction, although her romantic adult novels written in the 1890s were also popular. She wrote and helped to produce stage versions of Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess.

Burnett enjoyed socializing and lived a lavish lifestyle. Beginning in the 1880s, she began to travel to England frequently and in the 1890s bought a home there, where she wrote The Secret Garden. Her oldest son, Lionel, died of tuberculosis in 1890, which caused a relapse of the depression she had struggled with for much of her life. She divorced Swan Burnett in 1898, married Stephen Townsend in 1900, and divorced him in 1902. A few years later she settled in Nassau County, Long Island, where she died in 1924 and is buried in Roslyn Cemetery.

In 1936 a memorial sculpture by Bessie Potter Vonnoh was erected in her honour in Central Park's Conservatory Garden. The statue depicts her two famous Secret Garden characters, Mary and Dickon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Augusto Baldassari
• Release date: Mar 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9788826042251

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) grew up in England, but she began writing what was to become The Secret Garden in 1909, when she was creating a garden for a new home in Long Island, New York. Frances was a born storyteller. Even as a young child, her greatest pleasure was making up stories and acting them out, using her dolls as characters. She wrote over forty books in her lifetime.

Book preview

Le Monsieur De La Petite Dame

Frances Hodgson Burnett

It was Madame who first entered the box, and Madame was bright with youthful bloom, bright with jewels, and, moreover, a beauty. She was a little creature, with childishly large eyes, a low, white forehead, reddish-brown hair, and Greek nose and mouth.

Clearly, remarked the old lady in the box opposite, not a Frenchwoman. Her youth is too girlish, and she has too petulant an air of indifference.

This old lady in the box opposite was that venerable and somewhat severe aristocrat, Madame de Castro, and having gazed for a moment or so a little disapprovingly at the new arrival, she turned her glasses to the young beauty's companion and uttered an exclamation.

It was at Monsieur she was looking now. Monsieur had followed his wife closely, bearing her fan and bouquet and wrap, and had silently seated him self a little behind her and in the shadow.

"Ciel! cried Madame de Castro, what an ugly little man!"

It was not an unnatural exclamation. Fate had not been so kind to the individual referred to as she might have been in fact she had been definitely cruel. He was small of figure, insignificant, dark, and wore a patient sphynx-like air of gravity. He did not seem to speak or move, simply sat in the shadow holding his wife's belongings, apparently almost entirely unnoticed by her.

I don't know him at all, said Madame de Castro; though that is not to be wondered at, since I have exiled myself long enough to forget and be forgotten by half Paris. What is his name?

The gentleman at her side a distinguished-looking old young man, with a sarcastic smile began with the smile, and ended with a half laugh.

They call him, he replied, Le Monsieur de la petite Dame. His name is Villefort.

Le Monsieur de la petite Dame, repeated Madame, testily. That is a title of new Paris the Paris of your Americans and English. It is villainously ill-bred.

M. Renard's laugh receded into the smile again, and the smile became of double significance.

True, he acquiesced, but it is also villainously apropos. Look for yourself.

Madame did so, and her next query, after she had dropped her glass again, was a sharp one.

Who is she the wife?

She is what you are pleased to call one of our Americans! You know the class, with a little wave of the hand, "rich, unconventional, comfortable people, who live well and dress well, and have an incomprehensibly naïve way of going to impossible places and doing impossible things by way of enjoyment. Our fair friend there, for instance, has probably been round the world upon several occasions, and is familiar with a number of places and objects of note fearful to contemplate. They came here as tourists, and became fascinated with European life. The most