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Having enjoyed the effect which he expected to produce, he said that he should perhaps visit the Princess; that she was a good person, and pious. "A truly great lady," he added, "who does not show her magnificence in gowns and hats. She wears her chemises for six weeks, and sometimes longer. The gentlemen of her train have seen her wear very dirty white stockings, which fell around her heels.
"No. The chemises aren't cut out. I haven't had time. There are enough shirts to go on with, aren't there, Mrs. James?" said Betty. "We can make do for this afternoon, Miss, but the men they're getting blowed out with shirts. It's the children's shifts as we can't make shift without much longer." Mrs. James, habitually doleful, punctuated her speech with sniffs. "That's a joke, Mrs.
To return to these good recluses, it was said by way of a joke, of course that they preferred finding a harlot in their chemises to a good woman. Certain other jokers reproached them with imitating the lives of the saints, in their own fashion, and said that all they admired in Mary of Egypt was her fashion of paying the boatmen.
They wash themselves once a year, but even then do not do so voluntarily, but because compelled by law. They emit such a terrible stench that one avoids, as much as possible, being near them. The Thibetan women, on the contrary, are very fond of cleanliness and order. They wash themselves daily and as often as may be needful. Short and clean chemises hide their dazzling white necks.
Hence we have white wigs* and grey stockings, medallions and gold chains with coloured handkerchiefs and discoloured tuckers, and chemises de Sappho, which are often worn till they rather remind one of the pious Queen Isabel, than the Greek poetess.
Their nurses, with pendent bosoms and fat shoulders peeping through the transparent muslin of their chemises, make a bouquet of colors, with their gay sarafani, their many-hued cashmere caps attached to pearl-embroidered, coronet-shaped kokoshniki, and terminating in ribbons which descend to their heels, and are outshone in color only by the motley assemblage of beads on their throats.
"Gracious, what chemises! coarse enough to scratch her skin off; not a thing can she use here," said Adele, emptying the bundle. Master, mistress, and servant were busy till past ten o'clock, deciding what cambric they should buy for the new chemises, how many pairs of stockings, how many under-petticoats, and what material, and in reckoning up the whole cost of Pierrette's outfit.
"Only this very morning," put in the sick woman, "I was saying to Mariette, 'You are a respectable girl, and barely earn twenty sous per day sewing on chemises worth three hundred francs apiece, for a kept woman." "Chemises worth three hundred francs apiece, ordered from Madame Jourdan? Let me see ah! yes, I know.
How many chemises have I, Frederic?" "Eh, parbleu, Monsieur le Vicomte sait bien que nous avons toujours vingt-quatre chemises," says Frederic, grumbling. Monsieur le Vicomte springs up shrieking from the dinner-table. "Twenty-four shirts," says he, "and I have been a week without a louis in my pocket! Belitre! Nigaud!"
After cruising till the mids declared they were ennuiéd of seeing the Havannah, the dry Tortugas, Cape Antonio, and the low land near Mississippi so often, and that they had worn their chemises twice over and had only soiled sheets for table-cloths; that they were obliged to get one of the marines to pipe-clay their stockings and the collar of their shirts when they were asked to dine in the cabin; that it was a horrible, hard case to eat biscuits filled with bargemen and purser’s lice; that the water was full of jenny jumps—all these miseries, concluded they, ought to be made known to the admiral, and that if he did not order the squadron in again he ought to be tried by a court of mids and reduced to the humble rank of a cockpitsman and feed off bargemen for a month.
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