'Don't trouble. I'll come and look for you myself at four o'clock exactly ; but I say, I'm not here by myself . . . .'
'With your friend again . . . ?' and a shiver ran down my back.
She burst out laughing.
'He's not very dangerous,' and she led up to me a blue-eyed girl of seventeen with bright fair hair.
'Here's my friend.'
I invited her too.
At four o'clock Leontine ran up to me and gave me her hand, and we set off to the Cafe Riche. Though that is not far from the Opera, yet Haug had time on the way to fall in love with the Madonna of Andrea del Sarto, that is, with the fair girl. And at the first course-indeed, we had hardly sat down-after long, extravagant phrases about the Tintoretto charm of her hair and eyes, Haug began a sermon on the aesthetic sin of dancing the cancan with the face of a Madonna and the expression of an angel of purity.
'Armes, holdes Kind!' he added, addressing us all.
'Why is it your friend talks such boring fatras?' Leontine said in my ear, 'and why does he go to balls at the Opera at all. He should go to the Madeleine.'
'He is a Germ<m, and they all suffer from that complaint,' I whispPred to her.
'Mais c'cst qu'il est ennuyeu:c, votre ami avec son mal de sermon. Mon petit saint, finiras-tu done bientot?'
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And while waiting for the end of the sermon Leontine, tired out, flung herself on to a sofa. Opposite her was a big lookingglass; she kept looking at herself in it, and at last could not refrain from pointing to herself and saying to me:
'Why, even with my hair so untidy and in this crumpled dress and this position, I really don't look bad.'
When she had said this, she suddenly dropped her eyes and blushed, frankly blushed up to her ears. To cover her confusion she began to sing the well known song which Heine has distorted in his translation, and which is terrible in its artless simplicity:
Et je mourrai dans mon hotel,
Ou a l'H6tel-Dieu.
A strange creature, elusive and full of life; the 'Lacerta'5 of Goethe's Elegies, a child unconsciously overcome by fumes. Like a lizard she really could not sit still for one minute, and she could not keep silent either. When she had nothing to say, she was singing, making faces before the looking-glass, and all with the insouciance of a child and the grace of a woman. Her frivolite was na'ive. Having started whirling by chance, she was still spinning, still hovering . . . . The shock which would have stopped her on the brink or finally thrust her into the abyss had not yet come. She had gone a good bit of the way, but she could still turn back. Her clear intelligence and innate grace were strong enough to save her.
This type, this coterie, this environment exist no more. She was 'la petite femme' of the student-of-old days, the grisette who moved from the Quartier Latin to this side of the Seine, neither faisant the unhappy trottoir nor possessing the secure social position of the camelia. That type has passed away, just as conversations by the fireside, reading aloud at a round table, chatting over tea have gone. Other forms now, other sounds, other people, other words . . . . The present has its own scale, its own crescendo. The mischievous, rather wanton element of the 'thirties
-du leste, de l'espieglerie-passed into chic; there was cayenne pepper in it, but it still retained a careless, exuberant grace, it still retained wit and intelligence. With the increase of business, commerce cast off everything superfluous, and sacrificed everything intellectual to the shop-front, the etalage. The type of Leontine, the lively Parisian gamine, stirring, intelligent, spoilt,
;; Lacertae ( lizards) is what Goethe called the young Venetian wonwn of easy Yirtue in Nos. 67-72 of his Epigrams (Venice, 1 790) . (A.S.)
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604
sparkling, liberal and, in case of need, proud, is not in demand, and chic has passed into chienne. What the Lovelace of the boulevards needs is the woman-chienne, and, above all, the chienne who has a master of her own. It is more economical and unmercenary-with her he can go hunting at someone else's expense, and pay only the extras. 'Parbleu,' an old man said to me, whose best years coincided with the beginning of the reign of Louis-Philippe, 'je ne me retrouve plus-au est le fion,6 le chic, ou est ['esprit? . . . Tout cela monsieur . . . ne, parle:.
pas, monsieur-c'est bon, c'est beau, well-bred, mais . . . c'est de la charcuterie . . . c'est du Rubens.'
That reminds me hovv in the 'fifties, nice, kind Talandier, with the vexation of a man in love with his France, explained her downfall to me with a musical illustration. 'When,' he said,
\ve were great, in the early days after the revolution of February, nothing sounded but the "Marseillaise"-in the cafes, in the street-processions, always the "l\1arseillaise." Every theatre had its "il1arseillaise," here vvith cannon, there with Rachel. \Vhen things grew duller and quieter, the monotonous sounds of
"lHourir pour la Patrie"7 took its place. That was no harm yet, but \ve sank lower . . . . "Un sous-lieutenant accable de besogne
. . . drin, drin, din. din, din" . . . the \vhole city, the capital of the world, the wholC' of France was singing that trash. That is not the end ; after that, "·e began playing and singing "Partarzt pour le Sn ic'' at the top and "Qu'aimf' done !\/argot . . . i11argot" at the bottom: that is, senselessness and indecency. One can sink no lower.'
One can ! Talandier did not foresee eitlwr 'le suis la femme a barrrbe' or 'The Sapper'; he stopped short at chic and never reached the clzienne stage.
Hasty. carnal debauchery got the upper hand of any embellishments. The body conquered the spirit and, as I said ten years ago, Margot, la fille de marbre, supplanted Beranger's Lisette and all the Leontines in the world. The latter had their humanity, their poetry, their conceptions of honour. They loved noise and spectacles better than wine and supper, and they loved their supper more for the sake of the setting, the candles, the sweets, the flowers. VVithout dancing and balls, without laughter and cha tler they could not exist. In the most luxurious harem they u 'Fion' is a colloq uial word about equivalPnt to 'esprit. ' ( Tr.) 7 B�· HougPt de Lisle und styled during the Revolution of February, 1 8+8,
'the second Marseillaise.' ( R . )
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would have been stifled, would have withered away in a year.
The finest representative was Dejazet�n the great stage of the world and in the little Theatre des Varietes. She was the living embodiment of a song of Beranger, a saying of Voltaire, and was young at forty-Dejazet, who changed her adorers like a guard of honour, capriciously flung away packets of gold, and gave herself to the first-comer to get a friend out of trouble.
Nowadays it is all simplified, curtailed. One gets there sooner, as country gentlemen in the old days used to say who preferred vodka to wine. The woman of fion intrigued and interested, the woman of chic stung and amused, and both, as well as money, took up time. The chienne pounces straight away upon her victim, bites with her beauty, and pulls him by the coat-tail sans phrases; here there is no preface: here the epilogue comes at the beginning. Thanks to a paternal government and the medical faculty, even the two dangers of the past are gone ; police and medicine have made great advances of late years.