Mademoiselle Miss, and Other Stories

CONTENTS

“ Mais que diable allait-elle faire en cette galère? ”
Paris is the gloomiest town in Christendom to-day,—though it is a lovely day in April, and the breeze is full of softness, and the streets are gay with people,—and the Latin Quarter is quite the dullest bit of Paris: Mademoiselle Miss left last night for England.
We all know what it is like when a person who has been an absorbing interest in our lives suddenly goes away: how, apart from the immediate pang of the separation and the after-pain of more or less consciously missing the fugitive, there is a wide, complex, dim underworld of emotion, that may be compared to the thorough-bass of a sad tune, and seems in some sort to relate itself to the whole exterior universe. The sun rises as usual, but the sunlight is not the same. Other folk, apparently unconcerned, pursue the accustomed tenor of their way; but we are vaguely surprised that this should be the case,—surprised, and grieved, and a little resentful. We can’t realise without an effort how completely exempt they are from the loss that has befallen us; and we feel obscurely that their air of indifference is either sheer braggadocio, or a symptom of moral insensibility. The truth of the matter is, of course, that our departing friend has taken with him not his particular body and baggage only, but an element from the earth and the sky. and a fibre from ourselves. Everything is subtly, incommunicably altered. We wake up to a changed horizon: and our distress is none the less keen because the changeling bears a formal resemblance to the vanished original.
So! Mademoiselle Miss has gone to England; and to-day it is anew and an unfamiliar and a most dismal Paris that confronts the little band of worshippers she has left behind her. Indeed, it was already a new Paris that the half dozen of us who had assembled at St. Lazare to see her off, emerged into from the station last night, after her train had rolled away. We found a corner seat for her in a third-class compartment reserved for dames seules; and while some of us attended to the registering of her box, others packed her light luggage into the rack above her head; and this man had brought a bunch of violets, and that a book for her to read; and Jean contributed a bottle of claret, and Jacques a napkin full of sandwiches: and taken for all in all, we were the forlornest little party you can easily conceive of, despite our spasmodic attempts at merriment. We grouped ourselves round the window of her carriage,—stopping the way thereby, though not with malice aforethought, for such other solitary ladies as might wish to enter,—whilst Miss smiled down upon us from eyes that were perilously bright; and we sought to defy the ache that was in our hearts, by firing off brisk little questions and injunctions, or abortive little jests.