Not willing to try on your patience, and bother you: but might it
just be an implicit reference to his writings?
Quote:
It's of no use to keep it back-- particularly in this abysmal vehicle, and here it comes: I am a Marquis--a French Marquis; French, because the peerage is not so well known, and the country is better adapted to romantic incident-- a Marquis, because the democratic reader delights in the nobility. My name is something LIGNY. I am coming from Paris to my country seat at St. Germain. It is a dark night, and I fall asleep and tell my honest coachman, Andre, not to disturb me, and dream of an angel. The carriage at last stops at the chateau.
[...]
Trees isolated, in clumps and assemblages, changed places before my window. The sharp outlines of the distant hills came back, as in daylight, but little softened in the dry, cold, dewless air of a California summer night.
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https://www.online-literature.com/bret-harte/1680/
He seemed to have had used that word,
https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/king-7.