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Above the gate a battered tin sign swung in the wind, and dim letters, almost effaced by elemental warfare, announced, "Adèle Aubin, Blanchisseuse." Dr. Grey passed through the postern, and found himself in a narrow, dark court, near a tall, dingy, dilapidated house, where a girl ten years of age sat playing with two ragged, untidy children.
Now upon a morning in February it happened that I was smoking a cigarette in the little garden, bordered by hedges of box, while waiting for my car, and as I waited I watched Jeanne, with her sleeves rolled up to her elbows and a clothes-peg in her mouth, busy over the wash-tub. "Vous êtes une blanchisseuse, aujourd'hui?" I remarked. She corrected me. "Non, m'sieu', une lessiveuse."
We will thank you to pay your bill, and settle your quarrels in the garden." "Here is the account," interpolated Andy Plade, "dinner for thirteen persons, nineteen hundred and fifty francs. "Manes of my ancestry!" shrieked Hugenot, overturning the blanchisseuse in his way, and rushing from the house.
What was it the charming Russian girl Bashkirtseff wrote on this very subject? 'Me marier et' ?" "I can tell you!" exclaimed Cicely "It was the one sentence in the whole book that made all the men mad, because it showed such utter contempt for them! 'Me marier et avoir des enfants? Mais chaque blanchisseuse peut en faire autant! Je veux la gloire! Oh, how I agree with her!
She offers to run away with him. He is transported, but magnanimous. He is wearied, perhaps. She sees him the next day offering flowers to the daughter of Madame la Comtesse Blanchisseuse. She is again in tears. She reads "Paul et Virginie." She is secretly transported. When she reads how the exemplary young woman laid down her life rather than appear en deshabille to her lover, she weeps again.
Probably you would find a blanchisseuse on the ground floor, and on the fourth a poet or perhaps a musician, like our fiddler of Louise. This is the real Bohemia, you know not the conscious Bohemia, but the true one, that is lawless simply because it knows no laws."
The applause which ensued was of such a nature that the proprietors below endeavored to hasten the conclusion of the dinner by sending up the bill. Pisgah and the blanchisseuse were embracing in a spirited way, and Simp was holding back Freckle, who persuaded that Hugenot's remarks were in some way derogatory to himself wished to toss down his gauntlet.
Then up hurried the good little priest, and set forth in French he was very indignant, by the by, at being taken for a Frenchman, and begged it to be understood that he was Belgian born and bred setting forth how His Excellency had not been expected till next day, or he would have had ready an address from the loyal inhabitants of Blanchisseuse testifying their delight at the honour of, etc. etc.; which he begged leave to present in due form next day; and all the while the brown crowd surged round and in and out, and the naked brown children got between every one's legs, and every one was in a fume of curiosity and delight anything being an event in Blanchisseuse save the one Chinaman, if I recollect right, who stood in his blue jacket and trousers, his hands behind his back, with visage unimpassioned, dolorous, seemingly stolid, a creature of the earth, earthy, say rather of the dirt, dirty, but doubtless by no means as stolid as he looked.
The hues of the distant woodlands, twenty miles away, seen through a veil of ultramarine, mingled with the pale greens and blues of the water: and they again with the pale sky, till the eye could hardly discern where land and sea and air parted from each other. We stopped to gaze, and breathe; and then downward again for nigh two thousand feet toward Blanchisseuse.
"It is an affair of the heart, Abbe," she said. "Allez! I know what I talk of. It is an affair of the heart and nothing more. There is some one in England: some blonde English girl. They are always washing, I am told. And certainly they have that air like a garment that has been too often to the blanchisseuse and has lost its substance. A beautiful skin, I allow you. But so thin so thin."
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