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.
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