[CHAPTER XV]
THE BEGGARS' BALL
That evening there was a ball on the flat above. It was refreshingly democratic. The rag-pickers who lodged with Madame Gougeon and laid the foundation of her iron business, attended. Thither thronged the beggars, the knife-grinders, the old-bottle collectors of the neighbouring rookeries. The crookedest men of Paris, the most hideous women, the squalidest tatters were on hand. They whirled and jumped furiously in their unwashed feet; they became almost invisible in the clouds of dust; the odour sickened, the screeching and jumping deafened one. Bad, but maddening, wine was drunk in torrents. A man would kick his partner and the combatants tumble over each other in the midst of an applauding circle.
Who were these libels on women, these alleged men, these howling fiends? They were a driblet of two hundred thousand such wretches who overran and menaced the city, a product of the dense illiteracy of the time.
Wife Gougeon entered with the Admiral. They pushed their way to a long table in the corner where some sots were gambling, and sitting down on one of the benches around it, she shouted a couple of words to the man nearest to her, who bolted off into the dust and returned with a red-nosed beggar.
"Motte," said she, leering, "are you now on the Versailles roads?"
"Always," he said sharply.
"Do your division watch Versailles?"
"Without ceasing."
"This is the Admiral."