"Monsieur, this person would come in in spite of us. We told her that
madame was not at home. She answered that she knew very well madame
had been out, but she saw her come in. She threatened to stay at the
door of the house till she could speak to madame."

"You can go," said Monsieur Desmarets to the two men. "What do you
want, mademoiselle?" he added, turning to the strange woman.

This "demoiselle" was the type of a woman who is never to be met with
except in Paris. She is made in Paris, like the mud, like the
pavement, like the water of the Seine, such as it becomes in Paris
before human industry filters it ten times ere it enters the cut-glass
decanters and sparkles pure and bright from the filth it has been. She
is therefore a being who is truly original. Depicted scores of times
by the painter's brush, the pencil of the caricaturist, the charcoal
of the etcher, she still escapes analysis, because she cannot be
caught and rendered in all her moods, like Nature, like this fantastic
Paris itself. She holds to vice by one thread only, and she breaks
away from it at a thousand other points of the social circumference.
Besides, she lets only one trait of her character be known, and that
the only one which renders her blamable; her noble virtues are hidden;
she prefers to glory in her naive libertinism. Most incompletely
rendered in dramas and tales where she is put upon the scene with all
her poesy, she is nowhere really true but in her garret; elsewhere she
is invariably calumniated or over-praised. Rich, she deteriorates;
poor, she is misunderstood. She has too many vices, and too many good
qualities; she is too near to pathetic asphyxiation or to a dissolute
laugh; too beautiful and too hideous. She personifies Paris, to which,
in the long run, she supplies the toothless portresses, washerwomen,
street-sweepers, beggars, occasionally insolent countesses, admired