Musette had the instinctive genius of taste. On coming into the world,
the first thing she had looked about for had been a looking glass to
settle herself in her swaddling clothes by, and before being christened
she had already been guilty of the sin of coquetry. At the time when her
position was of the humblest, when she was reduced to cotton print
frocks, little white caps and kid shoes, she wore in charming style this
poor and simple uniform of the grisettes, those pretty girls, half bees,
half grasshoppers, who sang at their work all week, only asked God for a
little sunshine on Sunday, loved with all their heart, and sometimes
threw themselves out of a window.

A breed that is now lost, thanks to the present generation of young
fellows, a corrupted and at the same time corrupting race, but, above
everything, vain, foolish and brutal. For the sake of uttering spiteful
paradoxes, they chaffed these poor girls about their hands, disfigured
by the sacred scars of toil, and as a consequence these soon no longer
earned even enough to buy almond paste. By degrees they succeeded in
inoculating them with their own foolishness and vanity, and then the
grisette disappeared. It was then that the lorette sprung up. A hybrid
breed of impertinent creatures of mediocre beauty, half flesh, half
paint, whose boudoir is a shop in which they sell bits of their heart
like slices of roast beef. The majority of these girls who dishonor
pleasure, and are the shame of modern gallantry, are not always equal in
intelligence to the very birds whose feathers they wear in their
bonnets. If by chance they happen to feel, not love nor even a caprice,
but a common place desire, it is for some counter jumping mountebank,
whom the crowd surrounds and applauds at public balls, and whom the
papers, courtiers of all that is ridiculous, render celebrated by their
puffs. Although she was obliged to live in this circle Musette had
neither its manners nor its ways, she had not the servile cupidity of