She was smiling, and at that moment, her eyes had
not their monkey-like and ferocious expression, but
they were pleading and tender, with all of their sweetest
childlike candor.
“You know,” my host said to me in a low
voice, “that the poor woman has fallen into
senile imbecility, and that is the cause of her looks,
which are so strange, considering the terrible sight
she has seen.
“Do you think so?” the magistrate said.
“You must remember that she is not yet sixty,
and I do not think that it is a case of senile imbecility,
but that she is quite conscious of the crime that has
been committed.”
“Then why should she smile?”
“Because she is pleased at what she has done.”
“Oh! no; you are really too subtle!”
The magistrate suddenly turned to Babette, and, looking
at her steadily, he said:
“I suppose you know what has happened, and why
this crime was committed?”
She left off smiling, and her pretty, childlike eyes
became her abominable monkey’s eyes again, and
then the answer was, suddenly to pull up her petticoats
and to show us the lower part of her person. Yes,
the magistrate had been quite right. That old
woman had been a Cleopatra, a Diana, a Ninon de L’Enclos,
and the rest of her body had remained like a child’s,
even more than her eyes. We were thunderstruck
at the sight.
“Pigs! Pigs!” la Frieze shouted
to us. “You also wanted to have something
to do with her!”
And I saw that actually the magistrate’s face
was pale and contracted, and that his hands and lips
trembled like those of a man caught in the act of
doing wrong.
He was going up the Rue des Martyrs in a melancholy
frame of mind, and in a melancholy frame of mind she
also was going up the Rue des Martyrs.
He was already old, nearly sixty, with a bald head
under his seedy, tall hat, a gray beard, half buried
in a high shirt collar, with dull eyes, an unpleasant
mouth and yellow teeth.
She was past forty, with thin hair over her pads,
and with a false plait; her linen was doubtful in
color, and she had evidently bought her unfashionable
dress at a reach-me-down shop. He was thin,
while she was chubby. He had been handsome, proud,
ardent, full of self-confidence, certain of his future,
and seeming to hold in his hands all the trumps with
which to win the game on the green table of Parisian
life, while she had been pretty, sought after, fast,
and in a fair way to have horses and carriages, and
to win the first prize on the turf of gallantry, among
the favorites of fortune.
At times, in his dark moments, he remembered the time
when he had come to Paris from the country, with a
volume of poetry and plays in his portmanteau, feeling
a supreme contempt for all the writers who were then
in vogue, and sure of supplanting them. She often,
when she awoke in the morning to another day’s
unhappiness, remembered that happy time when she had
been launched onto the world, when she already saw
that she was more sought after than Marie G. or Sophie
N. or any other woman of that class, who had been
her companions in vice, and whose lovers she had stolen
from them.
