"No, I won't, not till the bell rings. I'll keep out of his way as long as I can. I'm neither Dr. Wainwright's friend nor Dr. Wainwright's patient."
[CHAPTER X.]
MADAME CLARISSE.
Mrs. Stothard had been lucky in getting her daughter into such an unexceptionable establishment as that presided over by Madame Clarisse; at least, so everybody said who spoke to her on the subject, and, as we well know, what everybody says must be right. It does not detract from the truth of the assertion when it is confessed that very few people knew anything about Mrs. Stothard or her daughter; but the fact remains the same. Madame Clarisse was decidedly the milliner most in vogue during her day with the best--that is to say, the most clothes-wearing and most cachet-giving--section of London society; and any young woman who had the luck to learn her experience in such a school, and, after a few years, had the money to set up in business for herself, might consider her fortune as good as made.
No doubt that Madame Clarisse's position was not ungrudgingly yielded up to her, was not achieved, in fact, without an enormous amount of work, and worry, and industry, and self-negation on her part; without a proportionate quantity of jealousy and heart-burning, and envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness, on the part of those engaged in the same occupation. Even in the very heyday of her success, when her workwomen were sitting up for forty-eight hours at a stretch (Madame Clarisse lived, it must be recollected, before the passing of any ridiculous Acts of Parliament limiting the hours for women's labour); when the carriages were in double rows before her door; and when, after a drawing-room or a court-ball, the columns of the fashionable journals were seething with repetitions of her name--there were some people who said that they preferred the Misses Block, and roundly asserted that the Misses Block's "cut" was better than Madame Clarisse's. The Misses Block were attenuated old maids, who lived in Edwards Street, Portman Square, in a house which was as old-fashioned as, Madame Clarisse used to declare, were its occupiers, and who had suddenly blossomed from the steady county connection which their mother bequeathed to them into a whirl of fashionable patronage, notwithstanding that they were "bêtes--Dieu, comme elles sont bêtes!" according to their lively rival's account.
Madame Clarisse was not bête. If she had been, she would never have made the fame or the money which she enjoyed, and which were entirely the result of her own tact, and talent, and industry. No mother had ever left her a snug business with a county connection. All that she recollected of a mother was a snuffy old person with a silk handkerchief tied round her head, who used to live on a fifth floor in a little street debouching from the Cannebière in Marseilles, and who used to whack her little daughter with a long flat bit of wood when she cried from hunger or other causes. When this mother died, which she was good enough to do at a sufficiently early period of the girl's life, Clarisse was taken in hand by her uncle, an épicier and ship-chandler, who apprenticed her to a milliner in the town, and was kind to her in his odd way. The girl was sharp and appreciative, ready with her needle, readier with her tongue--she had a knack of conciliating obstreperous customers whose orders had been unduly delayed in a manner that delighted her mistress, a plain, blunt, stupid woman--readiest of all with her eyes. Not as regards oeillades, though that was a kind of sharpshooting in which she was not unskilled, but in the use of her eyes for business purposes. Mademoiselle Clarisse looked on and listened, and learned the world. No one came in or went out of the work-room or the showroom without being diligently studied and appraised by those sharp eyes and that quick brain. It was from her appreciation of the English character, as learned in the milliner's shop at Marseilles, that Mademoiselle Clarisse determined on seeking her fortune in our favoured land, should the opportunity ever present itself. Marseilles has a population of resident English--ship-owners, ship-captains, naval men connected with the great Peninsular and Oriental Company, many of whose vessels ply from that port--and these worthy people have for the most part wives and daughters, whose principal consolation in their banishment from England is that they are enabled to dress themselves in the French fashion, and at a much cheaper rate than they could were they at home. There is no gainsaying that the prices charged by the Marseilles milliner, even to the English ladies, were less than those which they would have been liable to in their native land; but these prices, which were willingly paid, were still so much in excess of those charged to the townspeople, that Mademoiselle Clarisse clearly saw that a country which produced people at once so rich and so simple was the place for her future action.
She was a clear-headed young woman, with simple tastes and an innate propensity for saving money; so that when her apprenticeship expired she had a sum laid by--small indeed, but still something--with which she determined to try her fortune in England. She had picked up a little of the language, and had obtained a few introductions to compatriots living in London; so that when she arrived, she was not wholly friendless or utterly dependent. Mademoiselle Anatole--born in Lyons, but long resident in London--wanted a partner; and after a very sharp wrangle, conducted by the ladies on each side with great skill and diplomacy, a portion of Mademoiselle Clarisse's savings was transferred to her countrywoman, and a limp and ill-printed circular informed Mademoiselle Anatole's patronesses that she had just received into partnership the celebrated Mademoiselle Clarisse from Paris, and that they hoped henceforth, etc.
Mademoiselle Anatole lived on the first floor of an old house in the Bloomsbury district, which had once been a fashionable mansion, but which was now let out in lodgings. Under the French milliner, a German importer of pipes and pictures and Bohemian glass had his rooms, and his name, "Korb," shone out truculently from the street-door jamb, towering above the milliner's more modest announcement of her residence. The entire neighbourhood had a foreign and Bohemian flavour. In an otherwise modest and British-looking house, Malmédie Frères announced in black-and-gold letters, much too slim and upright, that they kept an hotel "À la Boule d'Or." From the open windows in the summer-time poured forth, mixed with clouds of tobacco-smoke, waitings and roarings of the human voice, and poundings and grindings of pianos. The artists-colourmen had the street on their books (keeping it there as little as possible), canvases and millboards were perpetually arriving at one or other of the houses where the windows looking northward were run up into the next floor, and bearded men smoking short pipes pervaded the neighbourhood night and day.
Even the very house in which the milliners lived was not free from the Bohemian taint. On the second floor, immediately above the magasin des modes, and immediately under the private rooms of Mesdames Anatole and Clarisse, lived Mr. Rupert Robinson. Shortly after her arrival Mademoiselle Clarisse met on the stairs several times a middle-sized, middle-aged, jolly-looking gentleman, with bright roguish eyes and a light-brown beard, who bowed as he passed by, and gave her the inside of the staircase with much politeness, and with a "Pardon, ma'amselle," in a very good accent. Asked who this could be, Mademoiselle Anatole responded that it was probably "ce Robinson:" asked what was ce Robinson, Madamoiselle Anatole further replied that he was "feuilletoniste, littérateur--je ne sais quoi!" And Mademoiselle Anatole was not far out in her guess, to which she had probably been assisted by the constant sight of a grimy-faced printer's-boy peacefully slumbering on a stool specially placed for his accommodation outside Robinson's door. Those were the early days of cheap periodicals, and there were few newspaper-offices or publishers' shops where Mr. Rupert Robinson was unknown or where he was not welcome. He was a bright, genial, jolly fellow, with an inexhaustible stock of animal spirits and good-humour, with a keen appreciation of the ludicrous, and a singular power of hunting-out and levelling lance at small social shams and inflated humbugs of the day; and though he would not have used a bludgeon, and could not have wielded a cutlass, yet he made excellent practice with his foil, and when he chose, as it happened sometimes, to break the button off and set to work in earnest, his adversary always bore the marks of the bout. Generally, however, he kept clear of anything like heavy work, for which his temperament unsuited him, and confined himself to light literature, at which he was one of the smartest hands of the day; and, in addition to his journalistic and periodical work, he was one of the pillars of the Parthenon Theatre.
Those who only know the Parthenon in its present days--when it occasionally remains shut for months, to open for a few nights with "Herr Eselkopfs celebrated impersonation of the 'Jew whom Shakespeare drew,'" vide public advertisement and, published criticism from Berwick-on-Tweed Argus; when it alternates between opera and burlesque or tragedy and breakdowns, but is always dirty, and dingy, and mouldy-smelling, and bankrupt-looking--can have little idea of what it was in the days of which we are writing, when Mr. and Mrs. Momus were its lessees, and when there was more fun to be found within its walls than in any other place in London, even of treble its size. The chiefs of that merry company are both dead; the belles whose bright eyes enthralled us then are portly matrons now, renewing their former beauty in their daughters; the walking gentlemen have walked off entirely or lapsed into heavy fathers; and the authors, who were constantly lounging in the greenroom, and convulsing actors and actresses with their audacious chaff, are some dead, and all who are left sobered and steadied and aged. But all were young, and jolly, and witty, and daring in those days; and foremost amongst them was Mr. Rupert Robinson, who was then just beginning to write burlesques in a style which his successors have spoiled and written out, and was dramatising popular nursery stories, and filling them with the jokes, allusions, and parodies of the day.