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Updated: May 5, 2025
As I could not eat I drank a good deal, and not being able to sleep I spent the night in striding up and down my room like a man beside himself. On the third day, having heard nothing positive about the Charpillon, I went out at seven o'clock in the morning to call on her.
This curious individual began by astonishing me; he told me the whole story of what had taken place, the mother having been his informant. "The Charpillon," he added, "has not got a fever, but is covered with bruises. What grieves the old woman most is that she has not got the hundred guineas." "She would have had them the next morning," I said, "if her daughter had been tractable."
I felt that this was the proper way to speak to the girl, whose eloquence in pleading her cause was simply wonderful. She did not reply to my oration, and I asked her how she came to know me. "I saw you at Richmond with the Charpillon." "She cost me two thousand guineas, and I got nothing for my money; but I have profited by the lesson, and in future I shall never pay in advance."
When I came to consider what had passed the day before I concluded that the Charpillon was repentant, but I seemed no longer to care anything about her. Here I may as well confess, in all humility, what a change love worked on me in London, though I had attained the age of thirty-eight.
It was at this time I learnt the truth of the maxim that if abstinence is sometimes the spur of love, it has also the contrary effect. Sara had brought my feeling to a pitch of gentle friendship, while an infamous prostitute like the Charpillon, who knew how to renew hope and yet grant nothing, ended by inspiring me with contempt, and finally with hatred.
"She can't be the Charpillon," I said to myself, "she is some other girl like her, and my enfeebled senses have led me astray." In the meanwhile the lady, intent on her dancing, did not glance in my direction, but I could afford to wait.
In the second letter she said she had heard I too was ill, and that she was sorry to hear it, her daughter having informed her that I had some reason for my anger; however, she would not fail to justify herself on the first opportunity. The Charpillon said in her letter that she knew she had done wrong, and that she wondered I had not killed her when I took her by the throat.
However, M. de Saa was a man of worth and talent, and one could excuse this weakness as an incident inseparable from his profession; while most diplomatists only make themselves ridiculous by their assumption of universal knowledge. M. de Saa had been almost as badly treated by the Charpillon as myself, and we might have condoled with one another, but the subject was not mentioned.
The name Charpillon reminded me that I was the bearer of a letter for her, and drawing it from my pocket-book I gave it her, saying that the document ought to cement our acquaintance. "What!" she exclaimed, "a letter from the dear ambassador Morosini. How delighted I am to have it! And you have actually been all these months in London without giving it me?"
"Sir," said the Charpillon, "is it a fact that you charged the Chevalier Goudar to tell my mother that you would give a hundred guineas to spend the night with me?" "No, not to spend a night with you, but after I had passed it. Isn't the price enough?" "No jesting, sir, if you please.
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