F. I am Fashion, your sister.
D. My sister?
F. Yes—don’t you remember that we are both daughters of Decadence?
D. What should I remember, whose business it is to destroy all memory?
F. But I do, and I know that we are both equally busy, continually undoing and changing the things of this world, although you set about this task in one way, and I in another.
D. If you are not talking to your own thoughts, or to some person whom you have inside your throat, do raise your voice a little, and pronounce your words more clearly; for if you go on mumbling between your teeth with that thin cobweb of a voice of yours, I shall take till to-morrow to hear you. My hearing, as you know, is no better than my sight.
F. Although it is not exactly usual,—and in France people do not speak in order to be heard,—yet, as we are sisters, and can drop ceremony between ourselves, I will speak as you wish. I say that the nature and custom of both of us is continually to ruin the world; but you, from the beginning, have thrown yourself on the person and the blood, whereas I mostly content myself with beards, hair, clothes, furniture, palaces, and such-like. It is true that I have not failed to carry on certain games which may well be compared to yours—as, for instance, piercing holes in ears, lips, or noses,—burning the flesh of men with red-hot irons, with which I make them mark themselves for the sake of beauty,—forming the heads of babies by means of bandages and other contrivances, so that all the people in a country may have heads of the same shape, as I have done in Africa and in America,—laming people with narrow shoes,—choking the breath out of them, and making their eyes start out of their heads with the tightness of their stays,—and a hundred other things of the same kind. Not only so, but, generally speaking, I persuade and force all people of any position to bear unending fatigue and discomfort, every day of their lives—oftentimes pain and torture; and some of them will even die gloriously for the love they bear to me. I say nothing of the headaches, chills, colds of every kind,—daily, tertian, and quartan fevers, which men get through obeying me,—submitting to shiver with cold and be suffocated with heat, as I please,—to cover their bodies with woollen stuff, and their chests with linen, and do everything in the way I tell them, even though it be to their own hurt.
D. Well,—I am quite willing to believe that you are my sister, and, if you wish to have it so, I will consider it more certain than death—and you need not prove it out of the parish register. But if I stand still in this way, I turn faint; yet, if you have courage to run alongside of me, take care not to kill yourself, as I go at a great pace. If you can run you can tell me all you have to say as we go along; if not, I must leave you with a salutation, and promise you, in consideration of our relationship, to leave you all my property when I die.
F. If we had to run a race together, I don’t know which of us would win; for if you run, I do more than gallop. And as for standing still in one place,—if in turns you faint, it kills me. So then, let us run together, and, as you say, speak of our affairs as we go.
D. Let it be so. Since, then, you are my sister, it would be the right thing if you could help me somehow or other in my business.