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Updated: June 5, 2025
She saw the gentleman in him, but she could not see a husband. The indifference which the chevalier affected as to marriage, above all, the apparent purity of his morals in a house which abounded in grisettes, did singular harm in her mind to Monsieur de Valois against his expectations. The worthy man, who showed such judgment in the matter of his annuity, was at fault here.
All these denizens of a higher world were introduced by a saturnine clerk into M. Lebeau's reception-room, very quickly and in precedence of the ouvriers and grisettes. "What can this mean?" thought Graham; "is it really that this humble business avowed is the cloak to some political conspiracy concealed, the International Association?"
Good humor prevailed, though of a wild sort; the mad gallop of the Rigolboche had just flown round the room, like lightning, to the crash and the tumult of the most headlong music that ever set the spurred heels stamping and grisettes' heels flying; and now where the crowds of soldiers and women stood back to leave her a clear place, Cigarette was dancing alone.
Thus, the fifth-floor lodgers turn up their noses at the inhabitants of the attics; while the fifth-floor is in its turn scorned by the fourth, and the fourth is despised by the third, and the third by the second, down to the magnificent dwellers on the premier étage, who live in majestic disdain of everybody above or beneath them, from the grisettes in the garret, to the concierge who has care of the cellars.
Jacques, into the Quartier Latin, they then proceeded, but the students and the grisettes seemed to be fast asleep. Turning back, they passed the Fish Market, and here a large body of cavalry had bivouacked. Patrols marched to and fro; officers in huge dark cloaks smoked, laughed and chatted, regardless of the morrow. The friends went on. All was dark in the faubourg which succeeded.
He wore elegant boots with black trousers strapped under them, a fancy waistcoat, a becoming blue coat, collars that were the never-ending gift of grisettes, one of Bandoni's hats, and a pair of dark-colored kid gloves. His walk and bearing, cavalier and simple both, were not without grace.
Then, at three o'clock he came home, admired on horseback by the grisettes and the ladies who happened to be at their windows. After an affectation of study or business, which seemed to engage him till four, he dressed to dine out, spent the evening in the drawing-rooms of the aristocracy of Besancon playing whist, and went home to bed at eleven.
The class denominated grisettes alone offered an exception, as their demonstrations of gaiety, though free from boisterousness, betrayed stronger symptoms of hilarity than were evinced by women belonging to a more elevated class in society.
In the beginning he encountered, at no great expense, grisettes who were glad of his protection; but for the past three years he had fallen a prey to one of those unconquerable passions which sometimes invade the whole being of a man between fifty and sixty years of age.
Those strange combinations, into one tableau, of students and grisettes; opera-dancers, authors, viscounts, swindlers, romantic Lorettes, gamblers on the Bourse, whose pedigree dates from the Crusades; impostors, taking titles from villages in which their grandsires might have been saddlers and if detected, the detection but a matter of laugh; delicate women living like lawless men; men making trade out of love, like dissolute women, yet with point of honour so nice, that, doubt their truth or their courage, and piff! you are in Charon's boat, humanity in every civilised land may present single specimens, more or less, answering to each thus described.
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