Water me

Graham Robb

• BuyEccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in 19th-Century Paris by Miranda Gill
  Oxford, 328 pp, £55.00, January 2009, ISBN 978 0 19 954328 1

The word excentricité was first used in its figurative sense by Germaine de Staël in her Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française (1817). Until then, it had been an astronomical and geometrical term. In its new sense, it was an anglicism, expressing ‘a wholly original way of behaving which pays no heed to the opinion of others’. Eccentrics could be found everywhere, according to de Staël, but nowhere were they so prevalent or so noticeable as in England. The English character was (and perhaps, from a French point of view, still is) remarkable for ‘a bizarre mixture of timidity and independence’: ‘They do nothing by halves, and pass all at once from slavish observance of the minutest customs to the most complete indifference to what other people might think.’