The wide head-dress flapped a vehement assent.
“But you can’t answer?”
The head-dress fluttered a negative, and the mouth mumbled a negative in a French so thick, hesitant and broken as to be infinitely less expressive than the shake of the head.
Cartaret remembered what the concierge Refrogné had told him. To the circle of curious people he explained:
“She can understand a little French, but she cannot speak it.”
Madame snorted. “Why then does she come to this place so respectable if she cannot talk like a Christian?”
“Because,” said Cartaret, “she evidently thought she would be intelligently treated.”
It was clear to him that she would not have come had her need not been desperate. He made another effort to discover her nationality.
“Who of you speaks something besides French?” he asked of the company.
Not Madame; not Seraphin or Houdon: they were ardent Parisians and of course knew no language but their own. As for Garnier, as a French poet and a native of the pure-tongued Tours, he would not have soiled his lips with any other speech had he known another. Varachon, it turned out, was from the Jura, and had picked up a little Swiss-German during a youthful liaison at Pontarlier. He tried it now, but the stranger only shook her head-dress at him.