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GAB
Gab has an iron will. Her nurse told me that one day on a journey with her parents Gab, who was then a very small girl, wanted to have a donkey that was running along the railway track. She cried for the donkey and did not cease until they had found the beast and bought it for her.
Gab has rarely to be corrected. It seems as if some one had taught her all the politeness in the world, and all the seriousness as well. When nine years old she was reading Schopenhauer. At fourteen she was carrying on special research among the archives of the State police. At sixteen she was studying the literature of ancient India. At eighteen she published a manuscript she had found after her mother’s death. She spent her pocket money to have it published. The title of the book was Au Loin, and Jean Lorrain declared that it was the most beautiful book on India which he had ever read.
Gab’s mother must have written this book during her journey in India, for a short time before her death she had visited this interesting country, and had gained access to private houses and courts to which Europeans are not ordinarily admitted. She was a marvellously beautiful woman, and made a great sensation in a country in which beauty is held in high regard.
The story goes that one evening at a ball in the viceroy’s palace, to which she had been invited, her entrance made such a sensation that all the couples, forgetting that they were there to dance, stopped and came forward to admire her radiant beauty.
When she died those who attended her funeral wept like children, saying that she was too beautiful to have been an ordinary mortal, and that there was something supernatural in her countenance.
All her life she had been called the beautiful Mme. X.
At the time of my debut at the Folies-Bergère Gab was fourteen years old. One day her mother said to her: “There is a new foreign dancer whom everybody is going to see. We will see her at a matinee.”
On reaching the theatre to buy seats the day before the performance they asked about me at the ticket office. Gab’s mother, whose beauty captivated everybody, had no trouble in getting all the information she wanted. The following dialogue ensued:
“Is she pretty?” asked Gab’s mother.