—"Why, certainly, Cyrillia."
—"Toutt piti, piti?"—with growing surprise.
—"Why, of course!"
—"C'est drôle, ça" (It is queer, that!) She cannot understand it.
—"And the little manmaille in Martinique, Cyrillia—toutt piti, piti,—don't they talk creole?"
—"'Oui; mais toutt moune ka pâlé nègue: ça facile." (Yes; but anybody can talk negro—that is easy to learn.)
XII
Cyrillia's room has no furniture in it: the Martinique bonne lives as simply and as rudely as a domestic animal. One thin mattress covered with a sheet, and elevated from the floor only by a léfant, forms her bed. The léfant, or "elephant," is composed of two thick square pieces of coarse hard mattress stuffed with shavings, and placed end to end. Cyrillia has a good pillow, however,—bourré épi flêches-canne,—filled with the plumes of the sugar-cane. A cheap trunk with broken hinges contains her modest little wardrobe: a few mouchoirs, or kerchiefs, used for head-dresses, a spare douillette, or long robe, and some tattered linen. Still she is always clean, neat, fresh-looking. I see a pair of sandals in the corner,—such as the women of the country sometimes wear—wooden soles with a leather band for the instep, and two little straps; but she never puts them on. Fastened to the wall are two French prints—lithographs: one representing Victor Hugo's Esmeralda in prison with her pet goat; the other, Lamartine's Laurence with her fawn. Both are very old and stained and bitten by the bête-à-ciseau, a species of lepisma, which destroys books and papers, and everything it can find exposed. On a shelf are two bottles,—one filled with holy water; another with tafia camphrée (camphor dissolved in tafia), which is Cyrillia's sole remedy for colds, fevers, headaches—all maladies not of a very fatal description. There are also a little woollen monkey, about three inches high—the dusty plaything of a long-dead child;—an image of the Virgin, even smaller;—and a broken cup with fresh bright blossoms in it, the Virgin's flower-offering;—and the Virgin's invariable lamp—a night-light, a little wick floating on olive-oil in a tiny glass.
I know that Cyrillia must have bought these flowers—they are garden flowers—at the Marchè du Fort. There are always old women sitting there who sell nothing else but bouquets for the Virgin,—and who cry out to passers-by:—"Gagné ti bouquet pou Viège-ou, chè!... Buy a nosegay, dear, for your Virgin;—she is asking you for one;—give her a little one, chè cocott."... Cyrillia says you must not smell the flowers you give the Virgin: it would be stealing from her.... The little lamp is always lighted at six o'clock. At six o'clock the Virgin is supposed to pass through all the streets of St. Pierre, and wherever a lamp burns before her image, she enters there and blesses that house. "Faut limé lampe ou pou fai la-Viège passé dans caïe-ou," says Cyrillia. (You must light the lamp to make the Virgin come into your house.)... Cyrillia often talks to her little image, exactly as if it were a baby,—calls it pet names,—asks if it is content with the flowers.
This image of the Virgin is broken: it is only half a Virgin,—the upper half. Cyrillia has arranged it so, nevertheless, that had I not been very inquisitive I should never have divined its mishap. She found a small broken powder-box without a lid,—probably thrown negligently out of a boudoir window by some wealthy beauty: she filled this little box with straw, and fixed the mutilated image upright within it, so that you could never suspect the loss of its feet. The Virgin looks very funny, thus peeping over the edge of her little box,—looks like a broken toy, which a child has been trying to mend. But this Virgin has offerings too: Cyrillia buys flowers for her, and sticks them all round her, between the edge of the powder-box and the straw. After all, Cyrillia's Virgin is quite as serious a fact as any image of silver or of ivory in the homes of the rich: probably the prayers said to her are more simply beautiful, and more direct from the heart, than many daily murmured before the chapelles of luxurious homes. And the more one looks at it, the more one feels that it were almost wicked to smile at this little broken toy of faith.