"I accept it loyally," said he, with a bow, as if Blanquette had been a duchess.
"Adieu, Monsieur, et merci," she said holding out her hand.
Paragot stuck both his hands in his trousers pockets.
"My good child," said he, "you are bound straight for the most cheerless hell that was ever inhabited by unamusing devils."
Blanquette shrugged her shoulders and spoke in her dull fatalistic way.
"Que voulez-vous? I know it is not gay. But it is in the métier. When Père Paragot was alive it was different. He had his good qualities, Père Paragot. He was like a watch-dog. If any man came near me he was fierce. I did not amuse myself, it is true, but I remained an honest girl. Now it is changed. I am alone. I go into a brasserie to play and dance. I can get an engagement at the Café Brasserie Tissot," and then after a pause, turning her head away, she added the fatalistic words she had used before: "If faut passer par là, comme les autres."
"I forbid you!" cried my master, striding up and down in front of her and ejaculating horrible oaths. He invoked the sacred name of pigs and of all kinds of other things. My attention had long since been diverted from the learned Monsieur Thierry, and I wondered what she had to pass through like the others. It must be something dreadful, or my master would not be raving so profanely. I learned in after years. Of all mutilated lives there are few more ghastly than those of the fille de brasserie in a small French provincial town. And here was Blanquette about to abandon herself to it with stolid, hopeless resignation. There was no question of vicious instinct. What semblance of glamour the life presented did not attract her in the least. A sweated alien faces rabbit-pulling in the East End with more pleasurable anticipation.
"I am not going to allow you to take an engagement in a brasserie!" shouted my master. "Do you hear? I forbid you!"
"But Monsieur——" began Blanquette piteously.
Then Paragot had one of his sudden inspirations. He crashed his fist on the little table so that the glass and bottles leaped and Narcisse darted for shelter into the café.