Her employers allowed Lili to bring these boxes to decorate at home, and she painted at them almost from dawn to night. She swept, she washed, she stewed, she fried, she dusted; she did all the housework of her two little rooms; she tended the old woman in all ways; and she did all these things with such cleanliness and deftness that the attics were wholesome as a palace; and though her pay was very small, she yet found means and time to have her linen spotless and make her pots and pans shine like silver and gold, and to give a grace to all the place, with the song of a happy bird and the fragrance of flowers that blossomed their best and their sweetest for her sake, when they would fain have withered to the root and died in their vain longing for the pure breath of the fields and the cool of a green woodland world.
It was a little, simple, hard life, no doubt,—a life one would have said scarce worth all the trouble it took to get bread enough to keep it going,—a hard life, coloring always the same eternal little prints all day long, no matter how sweet the summer day might be, or how hot the tired eyes.
A hard life, with all the wondrous, glorious, wasteful, splendid life of the beautiful city around it in so terrible a contrast; with the roll of the carriages day and night on the stones beneath, and the pattering of the innumerable feet below, all hurrying to some pleasure, and every moment some burst of music or some chime of bells or some ripple of laughter on the air. A hard life, sitting one’s self in a little dusky garret in the roof, and straining one’s sight for two sous an hour, and listening to an old woman’s childish mutterings and reproaches, and having always to shake the head in refusal of the neighbors’ invitations to a day in the woods or a sail on the river. A hard life, no doubt, when one is young and a woman, and has soft, shining eyes and a red, curling mouth.
And yet Lili was content.
Content, because she was a French girl; because she had always been poor, and thought two sous an hour riches; because she loved the helpless old creature whose senses had all died while her body lived on; because she was an artist at heart, and saw beautiful things round her even when she scoured her brasses and washed down her bare floor.
Content, because with it all she managed to gather a certain “sweetness and light” into her youth of toil; and when she could give herself a few hours’ holiday, and could go beyond the barriers, and roam a little in the wooded places, and come home with a knot of primroses or a plume of lilac in her hands, she was glad and grateful as though she had been given gold and gems.
Ah! In the lives of you who have wealth and leisure we, the flowers, are but one thing among many: we have a thousand rivals in your porcelains, your jewels, your luxuries, your intaglios, your mosaics, all your treasures of art, all your baubles of fancy. But in the lives of the poor we are alone: we are all the art, all the treasure, all the grace, all the beauty of outline, all the purity of hue, that they possess: often we are all their innocence and all their religion too.
Why do you not set yourselves to make us more abundant in those joyless homes, in those sunless windows?
Now this street of hers was very narrow: it was full of old houses, that nodded their heads close together as they talked, like your old crones over their fireside gossip.
I could, from my place in the window, see right into the opposite garret window. It had nothing of my nation in it, save a poor colorless stone-wort, who got a dismal living in the gutter of the roof, yet who too, in his humble way, did good and had his friends, and paid the sun and the dew for calling him into being. For on that rainpipe the little dusty, thirsty sparrows would rest and bathe and plume themselves, and bury their beaks in the pale stone-crop, and twitter with one another joyfully, and make believe that they were in some green and amber meadow in the country in the cowslip time.