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The "rat" a slang word that has become old-fashioned was a girl of ten or twelve in the chorus of some theatre, more particularly at the opera, who was trained by young roues to vice and infamy. A "rat" was a sort of demon page, a tomboy who was forgiven a trick if it were but funny.
En traversant la Hongrie j'ai souvent rencontré des chariots qui portoient six, sept ou huit personnes, et où il n'y avoit qu'un cheval d'attelé; car leur coutume, quand ils veulent faire de grandes journées, est de n'en mettre qu'un. Tous ont les roues de derrière beaucoup plus hautes que celles de devant. Il en est de couverts
She did not entertain the alarm which would have been felt by some mothers with respect to her son's morals, probably exposed to some danger by his mode of life; perhaps she had not their scruples; and yet it is strange to see how light those weigh, even with our severest matrons, when any question of "position" is in the other scale: they will not only permit their sons to herd with roués, provided they are persons of distinction, but even accept them for their sons-in-law.
'Is it nothing, we are inclined to ask her, 'to feel the first rays of the sun at his rising, to be fanned with fresh breezes, to rejoice in the wind, to brave the storm; to have learned from childhood to welcome as familiar friends, the changes of the elements, and, in short, to have realised, in a natural life the 'mens sana in corpore sano'? Would she be willing to repeat the follies of her ancestors in the days of the Trianon and Louis XIV.? Would she complete the fall which began when knights and nobles turned courtiers and roués?
The Bailli de Conflans, astonished at this abundant eloquence, repeated it to me two days after, and I admit that I never have forgotten it. He would never content himself with one mistress. He needed a variety in order to stimulate his taste. I had no more intercourse with them than with his roues. He never spoke of them to me, nor I to him. I scarcely ever knew anything of their adventures.
They included Parisian grisettes and lorettes, recruited by Nini Moustache in her coquettish apartment of the Chaussée d' Antin, for Nini had proved a most effective missionary; young girls, who had fallen a prey to designing roués and been abandoned to the whirl of that gulf of destruction, the streets of Paris; Spanish senoritas, who had listened too credulously to the false vows of faithless lovers; Italian peasant girls, whose pretty faces and charms of person had been their ruin; unfortunate German, English, Dutch and Scandinavian maidens; and even brands snatched from the burning in Russia, Turkey and Greece.
Every gentleman who passed her during the evening had looked his homage freely old beaux, dignitaries, officers, foreign deputies, roués and as she had been two or three winters in that kind of society, nothing discomposed her. "Robert," she said, with part of a glance, as Utie rejoined her, "you go to the punch-bowl too much. You reflect upon me, sir.
The elderly roués, who buzzed like February flies in the sunshine of Deauville, seemed to have particularly fruity memories of tea-house sprees and oriental philanderings under the cherry-blossoms of Yokohama. Evidently, Japan was just like the musical comedies. Geoffrey began to be ashamed of his ignorance concerning his wife's native country. Somebody had asked him, what exactly bushido was.
I never knew a first love that did not end foolishly. Ah! Monsieur le baron, all that man has of the divine within him finds its food in heaven only. That is what justifies the lives of us roues. For myself, I have pondered this question deeply; and, as you know, I was married yesterday. I shall be faithful to my wife, and I advise you to return to Madame du Guenic, but not for three months.
Here, in Paris, amid that motley herd who feed on virtue, the moon shines down calmly on purblind embroiderers and peerless beauties, on worn-out roués and squalid beggars. The breeze that wafts to heaven the pure prayer of the maiden witnesses the fierce ribaldry of the courtesan; it flutters the curls of a sleeping infant, and bears on its wings the whispered exchange of chastity for bread.
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