On the fifth floor of No. 125 Rue Saint-Fargeau, there had been residing for some weeks, in a pretty enough, albeit cheap, set of rooms, two individuals who appeared at first blush to be just an amiable pair of turtle-doves.
They were quite young; the united ages of the two would barely have equalled that of M. Moche! The man looked twenty-three at most; his companion, a dainty, slim little person, a brunette with great dark eyes, had seen some sixteen summers at the outside.
They were lover and mistress, their names, his Paulet, hers Nini. The pair had set up house together in the Rue Saint-Fargeau after their union one Easter eve in the tenderest, but unconsecrated bonds of love. The two had known each other from childhood. Paulet was the son of a worthy woman who kept the porter’s lodge at a big house in the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or. Nini lived in the same house, whither she had come as quite a child with her mother, a respectable working woman, Mme. Guinon by name, widow of an employé on the railway.
Nini was the youngest of a large family; they had been five brothers and sisters, but two having died at an early age, Mme. Guinon had only three surviving children. The two elder, Firmaine and Alfred, were in regular employment, the former at a mantua-maker’s in the Rue de la Paix, the latter with a bookbinder in the Rue des Grands-Augustins; but Nini, a child of an uncontrolled and capricious temper and a venturesome and vicious disposition, could never acquire the habit of regular work, no matter how light. Instead of going apprentice, the girl had preferred to run the streets in company with the most outrageous young scamps, boys and girls, of the quartier.
This was the very thing to attract and fascinate Paulet, the concierge’s son, who, too, as the phrase goes, had a wild “bee in his bonnet,” and who from his teens upwards had been over and over again told by the flash girls of La Chapelle that he was far too pretty a lad ever to do any work.
For all that, Paulet was scarcely to be styled an Adonis; slenderly built and under the middle height, he had into the bargain a pasty complexion, colourless hair and a pair of pale, watery eyes. Still, the features were well cut, almost refined. It was a common saying in the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or that for sure his mother must have gone wrong one day with a man of quality to have brought such a piece of goods into the world.
In a word, Paulet was the women’s darling, because not only had the lad pretty manners of his own, but an inexhaustible fund of high spirits and an amazing gift of the gab—a typical “ladies’ man” in all the abomination of the term ... and in all its beauty!
The whole La Chapelle quarter was stirred to its depths when Paulet seduced little Nini Guinon, and had there and then resolved to set up house with the girl. There had been some violent scenes with the child’s family; Mme. Guinon, in particular, had been profoundly grieved at the catastrophe. But there, one must learn to take things as they come—and she had resigned herself to the inevitable.
As a matter of fact, for the two months the pair had been living together as man and wife, the lovers appeared to have grown quite well behaved. Nini kept her little home in decent order, Paulet worked now and then at his trade of stone-mason, which he had learnt once upon a time in a mighty haphazard fashion. Such at any rate was the official, ostensible occupation of the tenant of the fifth floor. But his real business, one which sometimes of evenings he constrained his pretty mistress to follow, was, may we surmise, of a less reputable sort.
An angle in the line of house-front enabled anyone looking out from the staircase window to see what was going on in the kitchen of the flat occupied by this dubious couple. At the moment M. Moche reached this window, Paulet and Nini were engaged in a highly animated conversation; and, be sure, the old man looked on and listened with all his eyes and ears.