"Indeed, I know it well. There are only bad masters."
"No, only bad servants. See, I offer you all the best houses; it is not my fault, if you do not stay in them."
She looked at me in a way that was almost friendly.
"Especially as you are very intelligent. You have a pretty face, a pretty figure, charming hands not at all ruined by work, and eyes that are not in your pockets. Good fortune might easily come to you. One does not know what good fortune could come to you ... with conduct."
"With misconduct, you mean."
"That depends on how you look at it. For my part, I call it conduct."
She was melting.
Little by little, her mask of dignity fell.
I was now confronted simply with the former chambermaid, expert at all rascalities. Now she had the piggish eye, the fat and flabby movements, the sort of ritual lapping of the mouth characteristic of the procuress, and which I had observed on the lips of "Madame Rebecca Ranvet, Millinery."
She repeated:
"For my part, I call it conduct."
"It! What?" I exclaimed.
"Come, Mademoiselle, you are not a beginner, and you are acquainted with life. One can talk with you. It is a question of a single gentleman, already old, not extremely far from Paris, and very rich,—yes, in fact, rich enough.
You will keep his house,—something like a governess, do you understand?
Such places are very delicate, much in demand, and highly profitable. This one offers a certain future for a woman like you, as intelligent as you are, as pretty as you are,—especially, I repeat, with conduct."
This was my ambition.
Many times I had built marvelous futures on an old man's fancy, and now this paradise that I had dreamed of was before me, smiling, calling me.
By an inexplicable irony of life, by an imbecile contradiction, the cause of which I cannot understand, I squarely refused this good fortune which I had wished for so many times, and which at last presented itself.
"An old rake! Oh! no! Besides, men are too disgusting to me,—the old, the young, all of them."
For a few seconds Mme. Paulhat-Durand stood in amazement.
She had not expected this sally. Resuming her severe and dignified air, which placed so great a distance between the correct bourgeoise that she wished to be and the bohemian girl that I am, she said:
"Ah! Mademoiselle, what do you think, then?
What do you take me for? What are you imagining?"
"I imagine nothing.
Only I repeat that I have had enough of men."
"Do you really know of whom you are speaking?
This gentleman, Mademoiselle, is a very respectable man.
He is a member of the Society of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul.
He has been a royalist deputy."
I burst out laughing.
"Yes, yes, of course.
I know your Saint-Vincent-de-Pauls, and all the devil's saints, and all the deputies. No, thank you!"
Then, suddenly, without transition, I asked:
"Just what is your old man?
To be sure, one more or less will make no difference. It is not a matter of great consequence, after all."
But Mme. Paulhat-Durand did not unbend.
She declared, in a firm voice:
"It is useless, Mademoiselle.
You are not the serious woman, the trusty person, that this gentleman needs.
I thought you were more suitable. With you, one cannot be sure of anything."
I insisted a long time, but she was inflexible. And I went back to the ante-room in a very uncertain state of mind. Oh! that ante-room, so sad and dark, always the same!
These girls sprawling and crushed upon the benches, this market for human meat to tempt bourgeois voracity, this flux of filth and this reflux of poverty that bring you back there, mournful waifs, wreckage from the sea, eternally tossed hither and thither.
"What a queer type I am!" thought I.
"I desire things ... things ... things ... when I think them unrealizable, and, so soon as they promise realization, so soon as they present themselves to me in clearer outline, I no longer want them."
There was something of this, certainly, in my refusal; but there was also a childish desire to humiliate Mme. Paulhat-Durand a little, and to take a sort of vengeance upon her by catching the contemptuous and haughty creature in the very act of catering to lust.
I regretted this old man, who now exercised over me all the seductions of the unknown, all the charms of an inaccessible ideal. And I found pleasure in picturing him to my fancy,—a spruce old man, with soft hands, a pretty smile, a pink and shaven face, and gay, and generous, and good-natured, not so much a maniac as M. Rabour, allowing himself to be led by me, like a little dog.
"Come here. Come, come here."
And he came, caressing, frisking about, with a kind and submissive look.
"Now sit up."
And he sat up, in such a funny way, with his forepaws beating the air.