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Page 6
"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, and
walked well, with the arrogant look of a dandy; her toilet was
remarkable for its ruinous simplicity.
"That is Carabine," said Bixiou, who gave her, as did Leon, a slight
nod to which she responded by a smile.
"There's another who may possibly get your prefect turned out."
"A marcheuse!--but what is that?"
"A marcheuse is a rat of great beauty whom her mother, real or
fictitious, has sold as soon as it was clear she would become neither
first, second, nor third danseuse, but who prefers the occupation of
coryphee to any other, for the main reason that having spent her youth
in that employment she is unfitted for any other. She has been
rejected at the minor theatres where they want danseuses; she has not
succeeded in the three towns where ballets are given; she has not had
the money, or perhaps the desire to go to foreign countries--for
perhaps you don't know that the great school of dancing in Paris
supplies the whole world with male and female dancers. Thus a rat who
becomes a marcheuse,--that is to say, an ordinary figurante in a
ballet,--must have some solid attachment which keeps her in Paris:
either a rich man she does not love or a poor man she loves too well.
The one you have just seen pass will probably dress and redress three
times this evening,--as a princess, a peasant-girl, a Tyrolese; by
which she will earn about two hundred francs a month."
"She is better dressed than my prefect's wife."
"If you should go to her house," said Bixiou, "you would find there a
chamber-maid, a cook, and a man-servant. She occupies a fine apartment
in the rue Saint-Georges; in short, she is, in proportion to French
fortunes of the present day compared with those of former times, a
relic of the eighteenth century 'opera-girl.' Carabine is a power; at
this moment she governs du Tillet, a banker who is very influential in
the Chamber of Deputies."
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