lready an old rat for she is thirteen years
of age. Two years from now that creature may be worth sixty thousand
francs; she will be all or nothing, a great danseuse or a marcheuse, a
celebrated person or a vulgar courtesan. She has worked hard since she
was eight years old. Such as you see her, she is worn out with fatigue;
she exhausted her body this morning in the dancing-class, she is just
leaving a rehearsal where the evolutions are as complicated as a Chinese
puzzle; and she'll go through them again to-night. The rat is one of
the primary elements of the Opera; she is to the leading danseuse what a
junior clerk is to a notary. The rat is--hope."

"Who produces the rat?" asked Gazonal.

"Porters, paupers, actors, dancers," replied Bixiou. "Only the lowest
depths of poverty could force a child to subject her feet and joints to
positive torture, to keep herself virtuous out of mere speculation until
she is eighteen years of age, and to live with some horrible old crone
like a beautiful plant in a dressing of manure. You shall see now a
procession defiling before you, one after the other, of men of talent,
little and great, artists in seed or flower, who are raising to the
glory of France that every-day monument called the Opera, an assemblage
of forces, wills, and forms of genius, nowhere collected as in Paris.

"I have already seen the Opera," said Gazonal, with a self-sufficient
air.

"Yes, from a three-francs-sixty-sous seat among the gods," replied
the landscape painter; "just as you have seen Paris in the rue
Croix-des-Petits-Champs, without knowing anything about it. What did
they give at the Opera when you were there?"

"Guillaume Tell."

"Well," said Leon, "Matilde's grand DUO must have delighted you. What do
you suppose that charming singer did when she left the stage?"

"She--well, what?"

"She ate two bloody mutton-chops which her servant had ready for her."

"Pooh! nonsense!"

"Malibran kept up on brandy--but it killed her in the end. Another
thing! You have seen the ballet, and you'll now see it defiling past you
in its every-day clothes, without knowing that the face of your lawsuit
depends on a pair of those legs."

"My lawsuit!"

"See, cousin, here comes what is called a marcheuse."

Leon pointed to one of those handsome creatures who at twenty-five years
of age have lived sixty, and whose beauty is so real and so sure of
being cultivated that they make no display of it. She was tall,