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HIS FERRET EYES STARED HER IN THE FACE OVER HIS JAUNTY LITTLE CANE

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his eyes, and, like the bird of prey he was, noting the direction they had taken. He chewed the end of his cigarette, tapped his cane on the floor, and gave an occasional half-angry, half-admiring exclamation:

"Humph! satisfied! satisfied! There's a cheeky one for you !" he muttered to himself, screwing up his white eyelids and puffing smoke from his lips. But his small black eyes gleamed.

When the boat drew in to the next station, he was in the line of stragglers who handed in their brass tickets and stepped ashore, and I saw him turn back towards Passy, regardless of the aeroplanes. His furtive air suggested that, first of all, he was going to find out the truth about that imaginary little lover of hers.

It is from scenes like this that the stranger concludes-and not entirely without reason that the young Paris working-girl of to-day is the direct descendant of Mimi Pinson, of whom Alfred de Musset drew so immortal a portrait: Mimi of the charmed fingers, light-headed, light-hearted, living from hand to mouth; Mimi of the round face, the turn-up nose, and the sparkling black eyes, who plied her needle all day for small recompense, but was not averse to making merry at night with Bohemian students:

"Mimi Pinson est une blonde,

Une blonde l'on connaît.
que
Elle n'a qu'une robe au monde,
Landerirette!

Et qu'un bonnet."

Art and literature have liked to perpetuate the tradition. What is Charpentier's "Louise" but a modern version of the same young woman? Louise wears a hat, to be sure, instead of a little white cap, but in other respects times haven't changed much since 1840, we say to ourselves, as we see her in her giddy dressmaker's shop, and at last, rebelling against the parental onion soup, carried away on a wave of intoxication to seek joy of life with artists in Montmartre.

When one visits, as I did last year, the establishments of the great dressmakers and the milliners in the neighborhood of the Rue de la Paix, a Mimi-Louise seems the inevitable flower of the artificial soil in which she grows. This world of the métiers de luxethe gilt-edged trades, one might call them, which minister only to luxurious tastes and large bank-accounts-is a world apart; a world, moreover, of striking contrasts. On one side of a door all is splendid glitter and a

suave, extravagant ease that sounds in the smooth voices of the saleswomen, in the rustle and trail of the frocks displayed by the mannequins (living models), in the very chink of the bottomless pockets of the millionaires. On the other side of the door, dingy back stairs, bare corridors, crowded, confused workrooms, an atmosphere tense with effort and frenzied haste. The forewoman from a raised platform drives the needles forward with quick, sharp gestures and watchful eyes: "A little more care with that cuff, Marguerite." "You're slow, Alice; hurry up a bit there, my little girl!" She knows to a sou what every girl is worth and how far she may be goaded. The only standard common to both sides of the door is that of the Parisian secret, the cachet Parisien. Its form changes, subtly or fantastically, from week to week; its value never changes but to increase. The girl of the skillfulest fingers, however, thinks herself lucky if her métier de luxe gives her three or four, or at most five, francs a day.

Yet from these very workrooms and from those of the region to the eastward of "the center "the region of wholesale houses, of flower and feather shops, which, in proportion as it stretches out towards the suburbs, declines in standards of workmanship and wages-from these countless ateliers, as I discovered, trudge home at night to their humble rooms, not only the light-headed grisettes, but girls whose hearts are burning with an ardor for social regeneration as keen as that felt by any Russian Jewess or any English factory hand; and gentle souls of another stamp, who live out their days in the glow of a sort of romance that no petit amoureux has ever known how to kindle.

At the Café du Sillon from Justine and Henriette, at the Bourse du Travail from Mademoiselle Marcelle, and from a milliner called Marie Constance, I learned many things about the life and outlook of the Paris working-girl that opera and fiction have not celebrated.

Marie Constance illustrated for me just how hard it is for a girl of fastidious taste to exist alone on five francs a day. She considered it impossible, indeed; that is why she trimmed hats in the evening on her own account.

Our first meeting occurred, characteristically, after ten o'clock, one October night. Hearing a timid knock at my door, I looked out, and found her standing in the corridor, where the lights were turned low. I could

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OUT OF THE WORKSHOPS OF FASHION

see nothing at first but an enormous scoop-
ing hat-brim.
It was as if the hat's owner,
with a kind of inverted ostrich instinct, sought
to hide away under its smart roll her be-
seeching dark eyes, her shabbily modest fig-
ure, and the bulging yellow-paper bags with
which she was laden.

"Ah, pardon; Mademoiselle was retiring?"
She seemed all ready, timidly and silently, to
vanish into the gloom, and I almost put a
hand on her arm to hold her back. She was
the modiste whom my friend Madame B. had
sent. But if it were too late for Mademoi-
selle?" Her voice was as frail and thinly
sweet as her little face.

As she came in and sat down in a tired heap on the couch to open her bags, I said that if lateness were in question she was the person to be considered. She hastened eagerly to explain away her obvious weari ness. There was no resisting the radiant appeal of those soft dark eyes.

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Léonie, the chambermaid, too-Léonie was a woman of the south, and in general conscious, in the presence of these Parisians, of her thick waist and her clumsy fingersfound pretty ways of describing her: "She's so dainty, Mademoiselle, like some little flower." This native, flower-like refinement, which in the Paris working-girl is so often touched with corruption, was in Marie tempered with, nothing more urbane than an exquisite politeness that took heed of every delicacy, and seemed to deny herself the right to a personal existence.

If she were very late, for example, she was "heartbroken to keep Mademoiselle up; but I was at Madame B.'s, on the Boulevard St. Germain. I waited indeed from eight to ten, but she was dining, and I couldn't dream of disturbing her-a lady so distinguished in all her person, and so kind!" On rainy nights, when she came in dripping, without an umbrella, her fears were all for my carpet: "I! Why, my big hat makes my umbrella-a little creature like me!" And, though her long journeys from one end of Paris to the other were made without a morsel of food, I could not induce her to take so much as a glass of milk. Patrons were patrons, and, if American ladies did not know what was suit

"It was her busiest season, that was it," for she was trimmer at a milliner's who "created" the models for the Rue de la Paix. Having worked through the summer on the winter's models, they were now beginning" on the spring." It was just a little fatiguing to think in straw in October! Every night her forewoman said, as she bade them goodnight, "Ideas, ideas, young ladies !" One really had to lie awake, for one couldn't let the other trimmers get ahead of one. And then there were her private patrons for evening work-ladies like Mademoiselle's charming friend Madame B. "And if Mademoiselle would say what sort of hat she wanted?" That was our first meeting, but the slim, black, drooping figure, with the big, modishable (I was made to feel), no customer of

hat, the paper bags, that had odd protuber-
ances to fit a feather or a bow, and the Bazin
novel-she always read on the "Metro,"
she told me, and Bazin was her favorite nov-
elist was soon a familiar presence in the
house, and to be seen gliding through the
court and up the stairs in the early morning,
at noon, or in the late evening. She worked
in the atelier from nine until seven, and there-
fore must visit her own ladies in the scraps of
time that remained. Yet she would come
again and again for a single hat. The diffi-
culty was to make her spare herself at all.
Her artist's soul was no respecter of her
bodily needs; hers was a real cult of service
and of perfection.

Even the concierge (janitress), suspicious
of everybody, and, above all, unfriendly

hers should ever see her milliner eat.

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"I have told Mademoiselle," she said, bending a bow over my eye, " that I always make my little dinner when I get to my room. An omelet, or something like that. It suits me perfectly, this arrangement. I am never hungry till midnight. After my dinner I am refreshed; I dash off my customers' hats in no time. I need little sleep, and I assure Mademoiselle that I am never late or tired at the atelier. Monsieur Louis winks at my copying his models, just because I am so prompt at nine o'clock, and come with courage in my heart and imagination in my fingers."

Monsieur Louis was a thoroughly satisfactory patron. At Louis's what you needed was a flair of a special sort; the flair to

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