P’tit-Bleu, poor P’tit-Bleu! I can’t name her without a sigh; I can’t think of her without a kind of heartache. Yet, all things considered, I wonder whether hers was really a destiny to sorrow over. True, she has disappeared; and it is not pleasant to conjecture what she may have come to, what may have befallen her, in the flesh, since her disappearance. But when I remember those beautiful preceding years of self-abnegation, of great love, and pain, and devotion, I find myself instinctively believing that something good she must have permanently gained; some treasure that nothing, not the worst imaginable subsequent disaster, can quite have taken from her. It is not pleasant to conjecture what she may have done or suffered in the flesh; but in the spirit, one may hope, she cannot have gone altogether to the bad, nor fared altogether ill.
In the spirit! Dear me, there was a time when it would have seemed derisory to speak of the spirit in the same breath with P’tit-Bleu. In the early days of my acquaintance with her, for example, I should have stared if anybody had spoken of her spirit. If anybody had asked me to describe her, I should have said, “She is a captivating little animal, pretty and sprightly, but as soulless—as soulless as a squirrel.” Oh, a warm-blooded little animal, good-natured, quick-witted, full of life and the joy of life; a delightful little animal to play with, to fondle; but just a little animal, none the less: a little mass of soft, rosy, jocund, sensual, soulless matter. And in her full red lips, her roguish black eyes, her plump little hands, her trim, tight little figure—in her smile, her laugh—in the toss of her head—in her saucy, slightly swaggering carriage—I fancy you would have read my appreciation justified. No doubt there must have been the spark 01 a soul smouldering somewhere in her (how, otherwise, account for what happened later on?), but it was far too tiny a spark to be perceptible to the casual observer. Soul, however, I need hardly add, was the last thing we of the University were accustomed to look for in our feminine companions; I must not for an instant seem to imply that the lack of a soul in P’tit-Bleu was a subject of mourning with any of us. That a Latin Quarter girl should be soulless was as much a part of the natural order of creation, as that she should be beardless. They were all of them little animals, and P’tit-Bleu diverged from the type principally in this, that where the others, in most instances, were stupid, objectionable little animals, she was a diverting one. She was made of sugar and spice and a hundred nice ingredients, whilst they were made of the dullest, vulgarest clay.
In my own case, P’tit-Bleu was the object, not indeed of love, but of a violent infatuation, at first sight.
At Bullier, one evening, a chain of students, some twenty linked hand in hand, were chasing her round and round the hall, shouting after her, in rough staccato, something that sounded like, “Ti-bah! Ti-bah! Ti-bah!”—while she, a sprite-like little form, in a black skirt and a scarlet bodice, fled before them with leaps and bounds, and laughed defiantly.
I hadn’t the vaguest notion what “Ti-bah! Ti-bah! Ti-bah!” meant, but that laughing face, with the red lips and the roguish eyes, seemed to me immensely fascinating. Among the faces of the other young ladies present—faces of dough, faces of tallow, faces all weariness, staleness, and banality, common, coarse, pointless, insipid faces—it shone like an epigram amongst platitudes, a thing of fire amongst things of dust. I turned to some one near me, and asked who she was.
“It’s P’tit-Bleu, the dancing girl. She’s going to do a quadrille.”
P’tit-Bleu.... It’s the fashion, you know, in Paris, for the girls who “do quadrilles” to adopt unlikely nicknames: aren’t the reigning favourites at this moment Chapeau-Mou and Fifi-la-Galette? P’tit-Bleu had derived hers from that vehement little “wine of the barrier,” which, the song declares, “vous met la tête en feu.” It was the tune of the same song, that, in another minute, I heard the band strike up, in the balcony over our heads. P’tit-Bleu came to a standstill in the middle of the floor, where she was joined by three minor dancing-girls, to make two couples. The chain of students closed in a circle round her. And the rest of us thronged behind them, pressing forward, and craning our necks. Then, as the band played, everybody sang, in noisy chorus:
“P’tit-Bleu, P’tit-Bleu, P’tit-Bleu-eu,
Ça vous met la tête en feu!
Ça vous ra-ra-ra-ra-ra,