"Mark yon old mansion frowning through the trees,
Whose hollow turret wooes the whistling breeze."
My acquaintance with Mademoiselle Josephine progressed rapidly; although, to confess the truth, I soon found myself much less deeply in love than I had at first supposed. For this disenchantment, fate and myself were alone to blame. It was not her fault if I had invested her with a thousand imaginary perfections; nor mine if the spell was broken as soon as I discovered my mistake.
Too impatient to wait till Sunday, I made my way on Saturday afternoon to Rue Aubry-le-Boucher. I persuaded myself that I was bound to call on her, in order to conclude our arrangements for the following day. At all events, I argued, she might forget the engagement, or believe that I had forgotten it. So I went, taking with me a magnificent bouquet, and an embroidered satin bag full of marrons glacés.
My divinity lived, as she had told me, sous les toits--and sous les toits, up seven flights of very steep and dirty stairs, I found her. It was a large attic with a sloping roof, overlooking a bristling expanse of chimney-pots, and commanding the twin towers of Notre Dame. There were some colored prints of battles and shipwrecks wafered to the walls; a couple of flower-pots in the narrow space between the window-ledge and the coping outside; a dingy canary in a wire cage; a rival mechanical cuckoo in a Dutch clock in the corner; a little bed with striped hangings; a rush-bottomed prie-dieu chair in front of a plain black crucifix, over which drooped a faded branch of consecrated palm; and some few articles of household furniture of the humblest description. In all this there was nothing vulgar. Under other circumstances I might, perhaps, have even elicited somewhat of grace and poetry from these simple materials. But conceive what it was to see them through an atmosphere of warm white steam that left an objectionable clamminess on the backs of the chairs and caused even the door-handle to burst into a tepid perspiration. Conceive what it was to behold my adored one standing in the middle of the room, up to her elbows in soap-suds, washing out the very dress in which she was to appear on the morrow.... Good taste defend us! Could anything be more cruelly calculated to disturb the tender tenor of a lover's dreams? Fancy what Leander would have felt, if, after swimming across the Hellespont, he had surprised Hero at the washing-tub! Imagine Romeo's feelings, if he had scaled the orchard-walls only to find Juliet helping to hang out the family linen!
The worst of it was that my lovely Josephine was not in the least embarrassed. She evidently regarded the washing-tub as a desirable piece of furniture, and was not even conscious that the act of "soaping in," was an unromantic occupation!
Such was the severity of this first blow that I pleaded an engagement, presented my offerings (how dreadfully inappropriate they seemed!), and hurried away to a lecture on materia medica at the École Pratique; that being a good, congenial, dismal entertainment for the evening!
Sunday came with the sunrise, and at midday, true as the clock of St. Eustache, I knocked once more at the door of the mansarde where my Josephine dwelt. This time, my visit being anticipated, I found her dressed to receive me. She looked more fresh and charming than ever; and the lilac muslin which I had seen in the washing-tub some eighteen or twenty hours before, became her to perfection. So did her pretty green shawl, pinned closely at the throat and worn as only a French-woman would have known how to wear it. So did the white camellia and the moss-rose buds which she had taken out of my bouquet, and fastened at her waist.
What I was not prepared for, however, was her cap. I had forgotten that your Parisian grisette[1] would no more dream of wearing a bonnet than of crowning her head with feathers and adorning her countenance with war-paint. It had totally escaped me that I, a bashful Englishman of twenty-one, nervously sensitive to ridicule and gifted by nature with but little of the spirit of social defiance, must in broad daylight make my appearance in the streets of Paris, accompanied by a bonnetless grisette! What should I do, if I met Dr. Chéron? or Madame de Courcelles? or, worse than all, Madame de Marignan? My obvious resource was to take her in whatever direction we should be least likely to meet any of my acquaintances. Where, oh fate! might that obscurity be found which had suddenly become the dearest object of my desires?
[1] The grisette of twenty years ago, bien entendu. I am writing, be it remembered, of "The days of my youth."
"Eh bien, Monsieur Basil," said Josephine, when my first compliments had been paid. "I am quite ready. Where are we going?"