ur Desmarets to the two men. "What do you want,
mademoiselle?" he added, turning to the strange woman.

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