actresses, applauded singers; she has even given, in the olden time,
two quasi-queens to the monarchy. Who can grasp such a Proteus? She is
all woman, less than woman, more than woman. From this vast portrait
the painter of manners and morals can take but a feature here and
there; the _ensemble_ is infinite.

She was a grisette of Paris; a grisette in all her glory; a grisette
in a hackney-coach,--happy, young, handsome, fresh, but a grisette; a
grisette with claws, scissors, impudent as a Spanish woman, snarling
as a prudish English woman proclaiming her conjugal rights, coquettish
as a great lady, though more frank, and ready for everything; a
perfect _lionne_ in her way; issuing from the little apartment of
which she had dreamed so often, with its red-calico curtains, its
Utrecht velvet furniture, its tea-table, the cabinet of china with
painted designs, the sofa, the little moquette carpet, the alabaster
clock and candlesticks (under glass cases), the yellow bedroom, the
eider-down quilt,--in short, all the domestic joys of a grisette's
life; and in addition, the woman-of-all-work (a former grisette
herself, now the owner of a moustache), theatre-parties, unlimited
bonbons, silk dresses, bonnets to spoil,--in fact, all the felicities
coveted by the grisette heart except a carriage, which only enters her
imagination as a marshal's baton into the dreams of a soldier. Yes,
this grisette had all these things in return for a true affection, or
in spite of a true affection, as some others obtain it for an hour a
day,--a sort of tax carelessly paid under the claws of an old man.

The young woman who now entered the presence of Monsieur and Madame
Jules had a pair of feet so little covered by her shoes that only a
slim black line was visible between the carpet and her white
stockings. This peculiar foot-gear, which Parisian caricaturists have