“He talks to that creature in her own tongue!” added Fleur-de-Lys, in a low tone, her irritation increasing every moment. This irritation was not diminished when she beheld the captain, enchanted with the gypsy, and, most of all, with himself, execute a pirouette on his heel, repeating with coarse, naïve, and soldierly gallantry,—
“A handsome wench, upon my soul!”
“Rather savagely dressed,” said Diane de Christeuil, laughing to show her fine teeth.
This remark was a flash of light to the others. Not being able to impugn her beauty, they attacked her costume.
“That is true,” said la Montmichel; “what makes you run about the streets thus, without guimpe or ruff?”
“That petticoat is so short that it makes one tremble,” added la Gaillefontaine.
“My dear,” continued Fleur-de-Lys, with decided sharpness, “You will get yourself taken up by the sumptuary police for your gilded girdle.”
“Little one, little one;” resumed la Christeuil, with an implacable smile, “if you were to put respectable sleeves upon your arms they would get less sunburned.”
It was, in truth, a spectacle worthy of a more intelligent spectator than Phœbus, to see how these beautiful maidens, with their envenomed and angry tongues, wound, serpent-like, and glided and writhed around the street dancer. They were cruel and graceful; they searched and rummaged maliciously in her poor and silly toilet of spangles and tinsel. There was no end to their laughter, irony, and humiliation. Sarcasms rained down upon the gypsy, and haughty condescension and malevolent looks. One would have thought they were young Roman dames thrusting golden pins into the breast of a beautiful slave. One would have pronounced them elegant grayhounds, circling, with inflated nostrils, round a poor woodland fawn, whom the glance of their master forbade them to devour.
After all, what was a miserable dancer on the public squares in the presence of these high-born maidens? They seemed to take no heed of her presence, and talked of her aloud, to her face, as of something unclean, abject, and yet, at the same time, passably pretty.