We had christened her Ça ira, because she was always bewailing her fate, her misfortune, and her mortifications. Every Sunday we said to her:
“Well, Ça ira, is life treating you better?”
And she made an unvarying reply:
“No, not much, but we’ll hope things will get better one of these days.”
How came this wretched, unattractive, and graceless creature to be following a profession that demands infinite attractions, confidence, skill, and beauty? A mystery. Paris, moreover, is full of harlots ugly enough to disgust a policeman.
What did she do during the remaining six days of the week? She had told us on several occasions that she went to work. At what? We did not care to know; we were quite indifferent to the way in which she managed to exist.
Later, I had almost lost sight of her. Our little company gradually dispersed, leaving the way open for another generation, to whom we also left Ça ira. I heard about it on the odd occasions when I went to lunch at the Fournaise.
Our successors, unaware of our reason for bestowing that name upon her, had supposed it to be an Oriental name and they named her Zaira: then in their turn they bequeathed their canoes and some of their river girls to the next generation.
(Generally speaking, one generation of boating men lives on the water for three years, and then leaves the Seine to take up law, medicine, or politics.)
Zaira then became Zara, and, later still, Zara was modified into Sarah. By this time, she was supposed to be a Hebrew.
The latest of all, the gentlemen with the monocles, now called her simply, “The Jewess.”
Then she disappeared.
And here I had found her again, selling tobacco at Barvilles.
I said to her:
“Well, things are better now, eh?”
She answered:
“A little better.”
I was seized with curiosity about this woman’s life.
In those earlier days, I had cared nothing at all about it; today I felt intimately concerned, held, vividly interested. I asked her:
“How did you manage to find an opportunity?”
“I don’t know. It happened just when I was least expecting it.”
“Was it at Chatou that you came upon it?”
“Oh, no.”
“Then where was it?”
“At Paris, in the boardinghouse where I lived.”
“Ah, so you did have a place in Paris?”
“Yes, I was with Madame Ravelet.”
“And who is Madame Ravelet?”
“You don’t know Madame Ravelet? Oh!”
“Indeed I don’t.”
“The dressmaker, the fashionable dressmaker in the Rue de Rivoli.”
Whereupon she began to tell me about a thousand little phases of her old life, a thousand hidden phases of Parisian life, the inside working of a fashionable dressmaker’s, the life led by these wenches, their adventures, their notions, the intimate psychology of a workgirl, that street hawk flitting along the sidewalks in the morning on her way to the shop, strolling bareheaded after the midday meal, and on her way home in the evening.
Delighted to talk of old times, she said:
“If you knew how terrible we were … and what awful things we did! We used to tell each other our adventures every day. We don’t think anything of men, I can tell you.
“As for me, the first trick I pulled off was over an umbrella. I had an old alpaca one, a disgraceful object. As I came in one rainy day, shutting it up, tall Louise says to me:
“ ‘I don’t know how you dare go out with that thing.’
“ ‘But I haven’t another, and at the moment funds are low.’
“The funds were always low!
“ ‘Go and pick one up at the Madeleine,’ she answers.
“That surprises me.
“She goes on:
“ ‘That’s where we all get them: there are as many as you want.’
“She explains the method to me. It is simple enough.
“So I go off with Irma to the Madeleine. We find the verger and explain to him that the week before we forgot an umbrella. Then he asks us if we remember what the handle was like, and I describe to him a handle with an agate knob. He takes us into a room where there were more than fifty lost umbrellas; we look through them all and we don’t find mine, but I choose a fine one, a very fine one with a handle of carved ivory. Louise went and claimed it some days later. She described it before she saw it, and they gave it to her without the least suspicion.
“For this sort of work, we dressed ourselves very smartly.”
And she laughed, opening and dropping the hinged lid of the big tobacco box.
She went on:
“Oh, we played our little games, and very queer some of them were too. You see, there were five of us in the workroom, four ordinary girls and one quite different, Irma, the lovely Irma. She looked like a gentlewoman, and she had a lover in the State Council. That did not prevent her from being very friendly with the rest of us. There was one winter when she said to us:
“ ‘You don’t know what a jolly good thing we’re going to pull off.’
“And she unfolded her idea to us.
“Irma, you know, was so shapely that she simply went to men’s heads, and she had such a figure too, and hips that made your mouth water. And now she had thought of a way for each of us to wangle a hundred francs to buy ourselves rings, and she planned it out like this:
“You know I wasn’t well off just then, and the others were no better; we hardly made a hundred francs a month in the workshop, no more. We had to make the rest on the side.
“Of course each of us had two or three regular lovers who gave us a little
