Camille | Page 4

the inquisitive ladies of
distinction. They entered a room with Persian hangings, and I was just
going to enter in turn, when they came out again almost immediately,
smiling, and as if ashamed of their own curiosity. I was all the more
eager to see the room. It was the dressing-room, laid out with all the
articles of toilet, in which the dead woman's extravagance seemed to be
seen at its height.
On a large table against the wall, a table three feet in width and six in
length, glittered all the treasures of Aucoc and Odiot. It was a
magnificent collection, and there was not one of those thousand little
things so necessary to the toilet of a woman of the kind which was not
in gold or silver. Such a collection could only have been got together
little by little, and the same lover had certainly not begun and ended it.
Not being shocked at the sight of a kept woman's dressing-room, I
amused myself with examining every detail, and I discovered that these
magnificently chiselled objects bore different initials and different
coronets. I looked at one after another, each recalling a separate shame,
and I said that God had been merciful to the poor child, in not having

left her to pay the ordinary penalty, but rather to die in the midst of her
beauty and luxury, before the coming of old age, the courtesan's first
death.
Is there anything sadder in the world than the old age of vice, especially
in woman? She preserves no dignity, she inspires no interest. The
everlasting repentance, not of the evil ways followed, but of the plans
that have miscarried, the money that has been spent in vain, is as
saddening a thing as one can well meet with. I knew an aged woman
who had once been "gay," whose only link with the past was a daughter
almost as beautiful as she herself had been. This poor creature to whom
her mother had never said, "You are my child," except to bid her
nourish her old age as she herself had nourished her youth, was called
Louise, and, being obedient to her mother, she abandoned herself
without volition, without passion, without pleasure, as she would have
worked at any other profession that might have been taught her.
The constant sight of dissipation, precocious dissipation, in addition to
her constant sickly state, had extinguished in her mind all the
knowledge of good and evil that God had perhaps given her, but that no
one had ever thought of developing. I shall always remember her, as
she passed along the boulevards almost every day at the same hour,
accompanied by her mother as assiduously as a real mother might have
accompanied her daughter. I was very young then, and ready to accept
for myself the easy morality of the age. I remember, however, the
contempt and disgust which awoke in me at the sight of this scandalous
chaperoning. Her face, too, was inexpressibly virginal in its expression
of innocence and of melancholy suffering. She was like a figure of
Resignation.
One day the girl's face was transfigured. In the midst of all the
debauches mapped out by her mother, it seemed to her as if God had
left over for her one happiness. And why indeed should God, who had
made her without strength, have left her without consolation, under the
sorrowful burden of her life? One day, then, she realized that she was to
have a child, and all that remained to her of chastity leaped for joy. The
soul has strange refuges. Louise ran to tell the good news to her mother.

It is a shameful thing to speak of, but we are not telling tales of pleasant
sins; we are telling of true facts, which it would be better, no doubt, to
pass over in silence, if we did not believe that it is needful from time to
time to reveal the martyrdom of those who are condemned without
bearing, scorned without judging; shameful it is, but this mother
answered the daughter that they had already scarce enough for two, and
would certainly not have enough for three; that such children are
useless, and a lying-in is so much time lost.
Next day a midwife, of whom all we will say is that she was a friend of
the mother, visited Louise, who remained in bed for a few days, and
then got up paler and feebler than before.
Three months afterward a man took pity on her and tried to heal her,
morally and physically; but the last shock had been too violent, and
Louise died of it. The mother still lives; how? God knows.
This story returned to my mind while I looked at the silver toilet things,