So I observed my neighbour with grave attention, watching the signs, analysing her movements, keeping my eyes open for the revelations her every attitude would make.
She opened a small bag and took out a newspaper. I rubbed my hands: “Tell me what you read, and I will tell you what you are.”
She began at the leading article with the air of a person savouring a delicate pleasure. The name of her paper leaped to my eyes: Echo de Paris. I was puzzled. She was reading one of Scholl’s scandalous commentaries. Devil take her, she read Scholl. … Scholl. She began to smile: a pointed jest. So she was not a prude, or an innocent. So much the better. A reader of Scholl—yes, a lover of our native wit, its fine shades, and its salt, even its pepper. A good sign. I thought: let us try her on another tack.
I went and sat near her, and began to read, no less attentively, a volume of poetry that I had bought for the journey: the Chanson d’amour by Félix Frank.
I observed that she had snatched up the name on the binding with one rapid glance, like a bird on the wing snatching up a fly. Several passengers, men, walked past us to look at her. But she seemed to think of nothing but her column of town scandal. When she had finished it, she laid her paper down between us.
I bowed and said:
“May I glance through your paper?”
“Certainly.”
“Do you care to look at this volume of verse in the meantime?”
“Yes, certainly. Is it amusing?”
The question puzzled me slightly. It is not usual to ask if a collection of verse is amusing. I answered:
“It’s better than that; it’s charming, delicate, and the work of an artist.”
“Give it to me, then.”
She took the book, opened it, and began to glance through it with a vaguely surprised air that made it clear she rarely read verse.
Some of it seemed to move her, some made her smile, but a different smile from the one she had worn when reading her paper.
I asked her suddenly:
“Do you like it?”
“Yes, but I like amusing things myself, very amusing things: I’m not sentimental.”
We began to talk. I learned that she was the wife of a captain of dragoons, stationed at Ajaccio, and that she was going to join her husband.
I very soon guessed that she had little love for this husband of hers. She did love him, but with the mild affection a woman retains for a husband who has not fulfilled the hopes roused in courting days. He had drifted from garrison to garrison, through a number of small, dull towns, such very dull towns. Now he was stationed in this island, which must be very gloomy indeed. No, everyone’s life was not amusing. She would rather have gone on living at Lyons with her parents, for she knew everyone in Lyons. But now she had to go to Corsica. The minister was not inclined to favour her husband, who had, nevertheless, an excellent service record.
And we discussed the places where she would have liked to live.
“Do you like Paris?” I asked.
“Oh,” she cried, “do I like Paris? How can you ask such a question?”
And she began talking about Paris with such ardent enthusiasm, such wild envy, that I thought: “This is the right string to touch.”
She adored Paris from afar, with a passion of repressed gluttony, with the exaggerated longing of a provincial and the maddened impatience of a caged bird who all day looks at a wood from the window where he hangs.
She began to question me, stammering in an agony of impatience: she wanted to be told everything, everything, in five minutes. She knew the names of all the famous people, and of many others whom I had never heard mentioned.
“How is M. Gounod? And M. Sardou? Oh, how I love M. Sardou’s plays! How amusing and witty they are! Every time I see one, I dream of it for a week. I’ve read a book of M. Daudet’s, too, which I enjoyed enormously. Sapho—do you know it? Is M. Daudet nice-looking? Have you seen him? And M. Zola, what is he like? If you only knew how Germinal made me cry! Do you remember the little child who dies in the dark? How terrible that is! It nearly made me ill. There’s nothing to laugh at in that, my word. I’ve read a book of M. Bourget’s, too, Cruelle Enigme. I have a cousin who was so excited about this novel that she wrote to M. Bourget. I thought the book too romantic. I like something humorous better. Do you know M. Grévin? And M. Coquelin? And M. Damala? And M. Rochefort? They say he’s a great wit. And M. de Cassagnac? Is it true that he fights a duel every day? …”
Somewhere about the end of an hour, her stock of questions began to run low, and having satisfied her curiosity by the wildest flights of imagination, I was able to talk myself.
I told her stories about the doings of society, Parisian society, real society. She listened with all her ears and all her heart. She must indeed have gathered a pretty picture of the fair and famous ladies of Paris. There was nothing but love affairs, assignations, speedy conquests and impassioned defeats. She kept asking me:
“Oh, is real society like that?”
I smiled as
