| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| I | The Imperial Theater | [1] |
| II | Number 1313 | [31] |
| III | The Grand Prize | [51] |
| IV | Courtship and Cribbage | [73] |
| V | A Parcel of Old Shoes | [90] |
| VI | The Blue Satin Bed | [113] |
| VII | A Most Imprudent Thing | [140] |
| VIII | An Old Lady and a Limp | [161] |
| IX | Back to the Black Cat | [180] |
| X | The Pope Wins | [200] |
| XI | By the Emperor’s Order | [222] |
THE FORTUNES OF FIFI
CHAPTER I
THE IMPERIAL THEATER
Although it was not yet six o’clock, the November night had descended upon Paris—especially in those meaner quarters on the left bank of the Seine, where, in 1804, lights were still scarce. However, three yellow flickering lamps hung upon a rope stretched across the narrow Rue du Chat Noir. In this street of the Black Cat the tall old rickety houses loomed darkly in the brown mist that wrapped the town and shut out the light of the stars.
Short as well as narrow, the Rue du Chat Noir was yet a thoroughfare connecting two poor, but populous quarters. The ground floor of the chief building in the street was ornamented with a row of gaudy red lamps, not yet lighted, and above them, inscribed among some decaying plaster ornaments, ran the legend:
THE IMPERIAL THEATER.
DUVERNET, MANAGER.
Imperial was a great word in Paris in the month of November, 1804.
Across the way from the theater, at the corner where the tide of travel turns into the little street, stood Cartouche, general utility man in the largest sense of the Imperial Theater, and Mademoiselle Fifi, just promoted to be leading lady. The three glaring, swinging lamps enabled Cartouche to see Fifi’s laughing face and soft shining eyes as he harangued her.
“Now, Fifi,” Cartouche was saying sternly, “don’t get it into your head, because you have become Duvernet’s leading lady, with a salary of twenty-five francs the week, that you are Mademoiselle Mars at the House of Molière, with the Emperor waiting to see you as soon as the curtain goes down.”
“No, I won’t,” promptly replied Fifi.