We were all pleased when people stopped and read this inscription. We took it as a tribute to the importance of our street, and we felt a proprietary interest in that tablet and in that house, as though this neighborly association with genius was something to our individual credit.
We had other distinguished people in our street, but they were very much alive, and their tablets were colored ones drawn by Chéret, and pasted up all over Paris in endless repetition; and though their celebrity may not live as long as has the poet's, while they are living they seem to enjoy life as fully as he did, and to get out of the present all that the present has to give.
The one in which we all took the most interest lived just across the street from me, and by looking up a little you could see her looking out of her window, with her thick, heavy black hair bound in bandeaux across her forehead, and a great diamond horseshoe pinned at her throat, and with just a touch of white powder showing on her nose and cheeks. She looked as though she should have lived by rights in the Faubourg St.-Germain, and she used to smile down rather kindly upon the street with a haughty, tolerant look, as if it amused her by its simplicity and idleness, and by the quietness, which only the cries of the children or of the hucksters, or the cracking at times of a coachman's whip, ever broke. She looked very well then, but it was in the morning that the street saw her at her best. For it was then that she went out to ride in the Bois in her Whitechapel cart, and as she never awoke in time, apparently, we had the satisfaction of watching the pony and the tiger and cart for an hour or two until she came. It was a brown basket-cart, and the tiger used to walk around it many times to see that it had not changed in any particular since he had examined it three minutes before, and the air with which he did this gave us an excellent idea of the responsibility of his position. So that people passing stopped and looked too—bakers' boys in white linen caps and with baskets on their arms, and commissionnaires in cocked hats and portfolios chained to their persons, and gentlemen freshly made up for the morning, with waxed mustaches and flat-brimmed high hats, and little girls with plaits, and little boys with bare legs; and all of us in-doors, as soon as we heard the pony stamp his sharp hoofs on the asphalt, would drop books or razors or brooms or mops and wait patiently at the window until she came.
When she came she wore a black habit with fresh white gloves, holding her skirt and crop in one hand, and the crowd would separate on either side of her. She did not see the crowd. She was used to crowds, and she would pat the pony's head or rub his ears with the fresh kid gloves, and tighten the buckle or shift a strap with an air quite as knowing as the tiger's, but not quite so serious. Then she would wrap the lap-robe about her, and her maid would take her place at her side with the spaniel in her arms, and she would give the pony the full length of the lash, and he would go off like a hound out of the leash. They always reached the corner before the tiger was able to overtake them, and I believe it was the hope of seeing him some morning left behind forever which led to the general interest in their departure. And when they had gone, the crowd would look at the empty place in the street, and at each other, and up at us in the windows, and then separate, and the street would grow quiet again. One could see her again later, if one wished, in the evening, riding a great horse around the ring, in another habit, but with the same haughty smile; and as the horse reared on his hind-legs, and kicked and plunged as though he would fall back on her, she would smile at him as she did on the children in our street, with the same unconcerned, amused look that she would have given to a kitten playing with its tail.
The houses on our street had tall yellow fronts with gray slate roofs, and roof-gardens of flowers and palms in pots. Some of the houses had iron balconies, from which the women leaned and talked across the street to one another in purring nasal voices, with a great rolling of the r's and an occasional disdainful movement of the shoulders. When any other than a French woman shrugs her shoulders she moves the whole upper part of her body, from the hips up; but the French woman's shoulders and arms are all that change when she makes that ineffable gesture that we have settled upon as the characteristic one of her nation.
