IV
La Chicot
About this time there appeared among the multifarious placards which adorned the dead walls and hoardings and railway arches and waste spaces of London one mystical dissyllable, which was to be seen everywhere.
Chicot. In gigantic yellow capitals on a black ground. The dullest eye must needs see it, the slowest mind must needs be stirred with vague wonder. Chicot! What did it mean? Was it a name or a thing? A common or a proper noun? Something to eat or something to wear? A quack medicine for humanity, or an ointment to cure the cracked heels of horses? Was it a new vehicle, a patent cab destined to supersede the world-renowned Hansom, or a new machine for cutting up turnips and mangold-wurzel? Was it the name of a new periodical? Chicot! There was something taking in the sound. Two short, crisp syllables, tripping lightly off the tongue. Chicot! The street arabs shouted the word as a savage cry, neither knowing nor caring what it meant. But before those six-sheet posters had lost their pristine freshness most of the fast young men about London, the medical students and articled clerks, the dapper gentlemen at the War Office, the homelier youths from Somerset House, the shining-hatted city swells who came westward as the sun sloped to his rest, knew all about Chicot. Chicot was Mademoiselle Chicot, premiere danseuse at the Royal Prince Frederick Theatre and Music Hall, and she was, according to the highest authorities on the Stock Exchange and in the War Office, quite the handsomest woman in London. Her dancing was distinguished for its audacity rather than for high art. She was no follower of the Taglioni school of saltation. The grace, the refinement, the chaste beauties of that bygone age were unknown to her. She would have “mocked herself of you” if you had talked to her about the poetry of motion. But for flying bounds across the stage—for wild pirouettings on tiptoe—for the free use of the loveliest arms in creation—for a bold backward curve of a full white throat more perfect than ever sculptor gave his marble bacchanal, La Chicot was unrivalled.
She was thoroughly French. Of that there was no doubt. She was no scion of the English houses of Brown, Jones, or Robinson, born and bred in a London back slum, and christened plain Sarah or Mary, to be sophisticated later into Celestine or Mariette. Zaϊre Chicot was a weed grown on Gallic soil, All that there was of the most Parisian La Chicot called herself; but her accent and many of her turns of phrase belied her, and to the enlightened ear of her compatriots betrayed her provincial origin. The loyal and pious province of Brittany claimed the honour of La Chicot’s birth. Her innocent childhood had been spent among the fig-trees and saintly shrines of Auray. Not till her nineteenth year had she seen the long, dazzling boulevards stretching into unfathomable distance before her eyes; the multitudinous lamps; the fairy-like kiosks—all infinitely grander and more beautiful than the square of Duguesclin at Dinan, illuminated with ten thousand lampions on a festival night. Here in Paris life seemed an endless festival.
Paris is a mighty schoolmaster, a grand enlightener of the provincial intellect. Paris taught La Chicot that she was beautiful. Paris taught La Chicot that it was pleasanter to whirl and bound among serried ranks of other Chicots in the fairy spectacle of The Sleeping Beauty, or the Hart with the Golden Collar, clad in scantiest drapery, but sparkling with gold and spangles, with hair flowing wild as a Maenad’s, and satin boots at two Napoleons the pair, than to toil among laundresses on the quay. La Chicot had come to Paris to get her living, and she got it very pleasantly for herself as a member of the corps de ballet, a cipher in the sum-total of those splendid fairy spectacles, but a cipher whose superb eyes and luxuriant hair, whose statuesque figure and youthful freshness did not fail to attract the notice of individuals.
She was soon known as the belle of the ballet, and speedily made herself obnoxious to the principal dancers, who resented her superior charms as an insolence, and took every occasion to snub her. But while her own sex was unkind, the sterner sex showed itself gentle to la belle Chicot. The ballet-master taught her steps which he taught to none other of the sisterhood under his tuition; he made opportunities for giving her a solo dance now and then; he pushed her to the front; and at his advice she migrated from the large house where she was nobody, to a smaller house in the students’ quarter, a popular little theatre on the left bank of the Seine, amidst a labyrinth of narrow streets and tall houses between the School of Medicine and the Sorbonne, where she soon became everybody. C’était le plus gentil de mes rats, cried the ballet-master, regretfully, when La Chicot had been tempted away. Cette petite ira loin, said the manager, vexed with himself for having let his handsomest coryphée slip through his fingers, elle a du chien.
At the Students’ Theatre it was that La Chicot met with her fate, or, in other words, it was here that her husband first saw her. He was an Englishman, leading a rather wild life in this students’ quarter of Paris, living from hand to mouth, very poor, very clever, very badly qualified to get his own living.
He was gifted with those versatile talents which rarely come to a focus or achieve any important result. He painted, he etched, he sang, he played on three or four instruments with taste and fancy, but little technical skill; he wrote for the comic papers, but the comic papers generally rejected or neglected his contributions. If he had invented a lucifer match, or originated an improvement in the sewing machine, he might have carved his
