Trilby

Trilby
George du Maurier
1864
PART FIRST
'Mimi Pinson est une blonde,' Une blonde que l'on connait; Elle n'a
qu'une robe au monde. Launderirette! et qu'un bonnet!'
IT WAS A FINE, SUNNY, showery day in April.
The big studio window was open at the top, and let in a pleasant breeze
from the north-west. Things were beginning to look shipshape at last.
The big piano, a semi-grand by Broadwood, had arrived from England
by 'the Little Quickness' (la Petite Vitesse, as the goods trains are called
in France), and lay, freshly tuned, alongside the eastern wall; on the
wall opposite was a panoply of foils, masks, and boxing-gloves.
A trapeze, a knotted rope, and two parallel cords, supporting each a
ring, depended from a huge beam in the ceiling. The walls were of the
usual dull red, relieved by plaster casts of arms and legs and hands and
feet; and Dante's mask, and Michael Angelo's alto-rilievo of Leda and
the swan, and a centaur and Lapith from the Elgin Marbles--on none of
these had the dust as yet had time to settle.
There were also studies in oil from the nude; copies of Titian,
Rembrandt, Velasquez, Rubens, Tintoret, Leonardo da Vinci--none of
the school of Botticelli, Mantegna, and Co.--a firm whose merits had
not as yet been revealed to the many.
Along the walls, at a great height, ran a broad shelf, on which were
other casts in plaster, terra-cotta, imitation bronze: a little Theseus, a
little Venus of Milo, a little discobolus; a little flayed man threatening

high heaven (an act that seemed almost pardonable under the
circumstances!); a lion and a boar by Barye; an anatomical figure of a
horse, with only one leg left and no ears; a horse's head from the
pediment of the Parthenon, earless also; and the bust of Clytie, with her
beautiful low brow, her sweet wan gaze, and the ineffable forward
shrug of her dear shoulders that makes her bosom as a nest, a rest, a
pillow, a refuge--the likeness of a thing to be loved and desired for ever,
and sought for and wrought for and fought for by generation after
generation of the sons of men.
Near the stove hung a gridiron, a frying-pan, a toasting-fork, and a pair
of bellows. In an adjoining--glazed corner cupboard were plates and
glasses, black-handled knives, pewter spoons, and three-pronged steel
forks; a salad-bowl, vinegar cruets, an oil-flask, two mustard- pots
(English and French), and such like things--all scrupulously clean. On
the floor, which had been stained and waxed at considerable cost, lay
two cheetah-skins and a large Persian praying-rug. One half of it,
however (under the trapeze and at the end farthest from the window,
beyond the model-throne), was covered with coarse matting, that one
might fence or box without slipping down and splitting one's self in two,
or fall without breaking any bones.
Two other windows of the usual French size and pattern, with shutters
to them and heavy curtains of baize, opened east and west, to let in
dawn or sunset, as the case might be, or haply keep them out. And there
were alcoves, recesses, irregularities, odd little nooks and corners, to be
filled up as time wore on with endless personal nick- nacks, bibelots,
private properties and acquisitions--things that make a place genial,
homelike, and good to remember, and sweet to muse upon (with fond
regret) in after years.
And an immense divan spread itself in width and length and delightful
thickness just beneath the big north window, the business window--a
divan so immense that three well-fed, well-contented Englishmen could
all lie lazily smoking their pipes on it at once without being in each
other's way, and very often did!
At present one of these Englishmen--a Yorkshireman, by the way,

called Taffy (and also the Man of Blood, because he was supposed to
be distantly related to a baronet)--was more energetically engaged.
Bare- armed, and in his shirt and trousers, he was twirling a pair of
Indian clubs round his head. His face was flushed, and he was
perspiring freely and looked fierce. He was a very big young man, fair,
with kind but choleric blue eyes, and the muscles of his brawny arm
were strong as iron bands.
For three years he had borne Her Majesty's commission, and had been
through the Crimean campaign without a scratch. He would have been
one of the famous six hundred in the famous charge at Balaklava but
for a sprained ankle (caught playing leapfrog in the trenches), which
kept him in hospital on that momentous day. So that he lost his chance
of glory or the grave, and this humiliating misadventure had sickened
him of soldiering for life, and he never quite got over it. Then, feeling
within himself an irresistible vocation for