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In Brideshead Revisited (1945), during the storm at sea, when almost all the other passengers are seasick, Julia asks, "where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?" (Little, Brown, 261). The last phrase seems like a cliché, but a little research indicates that Evelyn Waugh deliberately chose it to make several suggestions.
In his thorough "Companion to Brideshead Revisited" on An Evelyn Waugh Website (www.abbotshill.freeserve.co.uk), David Cliffe notes that Julia's question is a "wry joke about a famous movie," D. W. Griffith's Orphans of the Storm, "first shown in 1921." Cliffe adds that the story was "originally a French play, Les Deux Orphelines, written by Adolphe Philippe d'Ennery and Eugene Cormon and first performed in 1874." Presumably Waugh was familiar with the movie rather than the play.
Orphans of the Storm centers on two female characters, Henriette and Louise (Lillian and Dorothy Gish). Louise has been taken from her aristocratic family, abandoned, and adopted by Henriette's family of commoners. Henriette becomes an orphan when she loses her parents to the plague that also blinds Louise. In search of a cure, the two girls travel to Paris and are...