Léon’s prose reads as if she is pulling from old leather-bounds yet it is youthful in its flaws. The prose is often inflected with past perfect properness, further compounded by Cullen’s tendency here to avoid gloss, which I must say, in his translation of Yasmina Reza’s Happy are the Happy is wonderful. The more liberal use of contraction and word order so that Lenny’s note to Hermin “I am off to see the Pierre Charbonnière. […] I am not really sure how much time it takes, but I hope before night to be back” (69) reads more conversationally as “I’m off to see […] I’m not really sure […] I hope to be back before night” would have rendered the pair much more sympathetic in the English translation. It is true that their dialogue in the French seems to aspire to a register (expressing perhaps their affinity with the early twentieth century, or even Lenny’s German-ness), and I think Cullen recognized the need to treat their dialogues in English as less conversational.