The adventuress is usually favored by nature, and carries her fair face and symmetrical form to the best market. If not handsome, she is winning, has great chic, clear insight, a thorough understanding, and the weaknesses of our common humanity.
Good and kind at first, she has become what man has made of her; and in the vocation she has chosen, vanity and self are her impelling powers. Her beauty is a commodity she offers to the highest bidder. She receives large sums, but she squanders them recklessly; for display is almost the only passion of her being. She shines in the Bois; bets desperately at Baden; turns heads at Vienna; shocks the proprieties of London; dashes resplendent along the Nevski, in the height of the gayeties of Petersburg; creates a sensation at Florence; astonishes the staid Germans at Berlin; interrupts the opera at Madrid; and finally, furnishes the subject of a letter for the New York Herald.
CAREER AND FATE OF A COQUETTE.
Her career is necessarily brief, for her reign must end when years begin to tell. Between twenty and thirty-five her golden harvest must be gathered. Not unfrequently she dies by her own hand; but oftener she has learned prudence ere her charms have waned, and is contrite when it is no longer easy or graceful to sin. It is a great mistake to suppose that the adventuress is invariably drawn out of the Seine, and exposed at the Morgue. No longer able to repeat her triumphs, she likes to withdraw from Paris, in some retired town seek the consolations of religion, and bestow charity upon the poor. She is more interesting at forty than in the flush of her glowing youth; since then the flame of her self-love has been allowed to smoulder, and the radiance of her true womanhood returns once more.
The fourth circle of the demi-monde are those priestesses of Venus who sin without satisfaction, and laugh without gayety. They are not materially different in Paris from what they are in other cities. They have gone down by slippery and sable steps, but not to a level with despair. They do not despair and live, in the air of France; for with despair comes the pan of charcoal. They have intervals akin to cheerfulness, and highly-spiced sensations bounding from pleasure to delirium. They need not cease to hope or fear, since there is still a deeper deep; and that is the fifth circle, whose representatives frequent the streets at night, the cheaper cafés, and the common gardens, in search of means to continue in their horrid trade. Even these are not so degraded as the same kind of unfortunates are with us. They do not drink; they do not swear; they do not importune strangers rudely; they do not from the first disgust in their effort to attract. They have apartments of their own, a certain kind of society and a species of freedom that women, however fallen, always enjoy in France. They are not labelled outcasts, as in England and America, and therefore, in their darkest hours, they have glimpses of the heaven of hope. Careless and improvident as they are in their youth, they frequently provide for the future as years go on, and come to their end through confession and ecclesiastical forgiveness of all their transgressions.
THE LOWEST CLASSES.
The sixth class, the lowest and last of the semi-mundanes, are more nearly pariahs than any others of their kind. They rarely make any provision for to-morrow, since to-morrow is as dismal and as painful as to-day. Almost always in want, their wastefulness is such that they would be poor if every month were marked by a shower of gold. It is they who accost strangers at night on the Boulevards; ask loungers in the cafés to buy coffee and wine for them; make poses and smoke cigars in the streets; and are sometimes arrested for brawls, intoxication, and pilfering. When they have reached this grade of degradation they cannot go back; they cannot stand still; they cannot fall lower. They put formidable obstacles in their proper path, and are their own worst enemies. Such elasticity and endurance as they may have is soon spent. Before a great while, a damp cellar or dingy garret is broken open, a suffocating odor is perceived, the rude bed holds a corpse; a brazier of charcoal tells the story, and adds another to the countless tragedies which invariably keep the balance with life.
BALL AT MABILLE, PARIS.