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 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.