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it pretty well. Every time you're there you're very rough at the beginning, but by the time you've been there two weeks your vocabulary comes back to you. I can carry on a social conversation. I don't think I could carry on deep political or philosophical conversation, which I'm glad to say my daughter can. She's able to think in French, as well as speak it, and is able to discuss deep philosophical and political matters. But you should never trust yourself to speak about political matters unless you're dead sure, because you may easily, by just a little misunderstanding of idiom, give a wrong impression of what you're agreeing to.
However, Tardieu was very conversational. I realized that he was very sharp, very quick, extraordinarily well-informed, very well-informed about America, very cynical. He believed in nothing and believed particularly that man was rotten, and that you couldn't expect men to do the sensible thing. They would always do the wrong thing. They were headed toward self-destruction and left to their own devices that would be where they would go. They were just dumb. They would respond to emotions and to general indolence and promptings of lassitude, rather than to anything sensible. Such progress as the world had made since the break-up of
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