Lippincotts Magazine, December 1873 | Page 2

I questioned my heart.
Immediately after the coffee my pretty hostess, passing my chair, with
a quick motion in going out made me a slight gesture. I followed her
into a small office or ante-chamber adjoining. The furniture was very
simple; the indicator, with a figure for every bell, decorated the wall in
its cherry-wood frame; the keys, hanging aslant in rows, like points of
interrogation in a letter of Sévigné's, formed a corresponding ornament;
and a row of registers on the desk completed the furniture. One of these
books she drew forward, opened and presented for my signature, still
flashing over my face that intent but benevolent glance.
"Monsieur, have the goodness to inscribe your name, the place you
came from, and that of your destination."
I took the pen, and, with the air of complying exactly and courteously
with her demand, folded the quill into three or four lengths, and placed
it weltering in ink within my waistcoat pocket. I was looking intently
into my hostess's face.
I think no American can observe without peculiar complacency the neat
artisanne's cap on the brows of a respectable young Frenchwoman. This
cap is made of some opaque white substance, tender yet solid, and the
theory of its existence is that it should be stainless and incapable of
disturbance. It is the badge of an order, the sign of unpretending
industry. The personage who wears it does not propose to look like a
"dame:" she contentedly crowns herself with the tiara of her rank. Long
generations of unaspiring humility have bequeathed her this soft and
candid sign of distinction: as her turn comes in the line of inheritance
she spends her life in keeping unsullied its difficult purity, and she will
leave to her daughters the critical task of its equipoise. If she soils or
rumples or tears it, she descends in her little scale of dignities and
becomes an ouvrière. If she loses it, she is unclassed entirely, and

enters the half-world. The porter's wife with her dubious mob-cap, and
the hard, flaunting grisette with her melancholy feathers and
determined chapeau, are equally removed from the white cap of the
"young person." To maintain it in its vestal candor and proud sincerity
is not always an easy task in a land where every careless student and
idle nobleman is eager to tumble it with his fingers or to pin among its
frills the blossom named love-in-idleness: Mimi Pinson has to wear her
cap very close to her wise little head. To herself and to those among
whom she moves nothing perhaps seems more natural than the
successful carriage of this white emblem, triumphantly borne from age
to age above the dust of labor and in the face of all kinds of temptation;
but to the republican from beyond the seas it is a kind of sacred relic.
The Yankee who knows only the forlorn aureoles of wire and greased
gauze surrounding the sainted heads of Lowell factory-girls, and the
frowsy ones of New York bookbinders, is struck by the artisanne cap as
by something exquisitely fresh, proud and truthful.
My landlady's cap was as far removed from pretence as from vulgarity.
Her hair was brown, smooth, old-fashioned and nun-like. I looked at
her hand, which, having replaced the pen, was inviting me with a
gesture of its handsome squared fingers to contribute my autograph, I
made my note, pausing often to look up at my beautiful
writing-mistress: "PAUL FLEMMING, American: from Paris to
Marly--by way of the Rhine."
I had not finished, when, lowering her pretty head to scrutinize my
crabbed handwriting, she cried, "It is certainly he, the
américain-flamand! I was certain I could not be mistaken."
"Do you know me then, madame?'
"Do I know you? And you, do you not recognize me?"
"I protest, madame, my memory for faces is shocking; and, though
there are few in the world comparable with yours--"
She interrupted me with a gesture too familiar to be mistaken. A
tumbler was on the desk filled with goose-quills. Taking this up like a
bouquet, and stretching it out at arm's length to an imaginary passer-by,
she sang, with a mischievous professional _brio_, "Fresh roses to-day,
all fresh! White lilacs for the bride, and lilies for the holy altar! pinks
for the button of the young man who thinks himself handsome. Who
buys my bluets, my paquerettes, my marguerites, my penseés?"

It was strangely like something I well knew, yet my mind, confused
with the baggage of unexpected travel, refused to throw a clear light
over this fascinating rencounter.
The little landlady threw her head back to laugh, and I saw a small
rose-colored tongue surrounded with two strings of pearls: "Very well,
Monsieur Flemming! Have you forgotten the two chickens?"
It was the exclamation by