"He was a great favourite among us all, and also among the grisettes we used to meet at the gardens where dancing went on. I remember one especially—they called her the Tigresse. She seemed madly in love with Jimmie and would not allow any other woman to talk to him when she was present. She sat to him several times with her curly hair down her back. She had a good voice, and I often thought she had suggested Trilby to Du Maurier."
She was the model for Fumette, Eloise, a little modiste, who knew Musset by heart and recited his verses to Whistler, and who one day in a rage tore up, not his etchings as Mr. Wedmore says, as often, wrongly, but his drawings. Whistler was living in the Rue St. Sulpice, and the day he came home and found the pieces piled high on the table he wept.
Another figure was La Mère Gérard. She was old and almost blind, was said to have written verse, and so come down in the world. She sold violets and matches at the gate of the Luxembourg. She was very paintable as she sat huddled up on the steps, and he got her to pose for him many times. She said she had a tapeworm, and if in the studio he asked her what she would eat or drink, her answer was, "Du lait: il aimé ça!" They used to chaff him about her in the Quarter. Once, Lalouette invited all his clients to spend a day in the country, and Whistler accepted on condition that he could bring La Mère Gérard. She arrived, got up in style, sat at his side in the carriage in which they all drove off, and grew livelier as the day went on. He painted her in the afternoon: the portrait a success, he promised it to her, but first took it back to the studio to finish. Then he fell ill and was sent to England. When he returned and saw the portrait again, he thought it too good for La Mère Gérard. He made a copy for the old lady, who saw the difference and was furious. Not long after he was walking past the Luxembourg with Lamont. The old woman, huddled on the steps, did not look up:
"Eh bien, Madame Gérard, comment ça va?" Lamont asked.
"Assez bien, Monsieur, assez bien."
"It votre petit Américain?"
To which she replied, not looking up, "Lui? On dit qu'il a craqué! Encore une espèce de canaille de moins!"
And Whistler laughed, and she knew him, as so many were to know him, by that laugh all his life.
For ages after, in the Quarter, he was called "Espèce de canaille." And this is where Du Maurier got the story which he tells in Trilby—as he got all Trilby, in fact.
Another character in the Quarter of whom Whistler never tired of telling us was the Count de Montezuma, the delightful, inimitable, impossible, incredible Montezuma, not a student, not a painter, but one after Whistler's heart. He never had a sou, but always cheek enough to see him through. Whistler told us of him: