Fromont and Risler — Complete eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 312 pages of information about Fromont and Risler — Complete.

Fromont and Risler — Complete eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 312 pages of information about Fromont and Risler — Complete.

These small Parisian industries, which have to do with the most trivial details of the toilet, keep the work-girls informed as to the fashions and fill their minds with thoughts of luxury and elegance.  To the poor girls who worked on Mademoiselle Le Mire’s fourth floor, the blackened walls, the narrow street did not exist.  They were always thinking of something else and passed their lives asking one another: 

“Malvina, if you were rich what would you do?  For my part, I’d live on the Champs-Elysees.”  And the great trees in the square, the carriages that wheeled about there, coquettishly slackening their pace, appeared momentarily before their minds, a delicious, refreshing vision.

Little Chebe, in her corner, listened without speaking, industriously stringing her black grapes with the precocious dexterity and taste she had acquired in Desiree’s neighborhood.  So that in the evening, when M. Chebe came to fetch his daughter, they praised her in the highest terms.

Thereafter all her days were alike.  The next day, instead of black pearls, she strung white pearls and bits of false coral; for at Mademoiselle Le Mire’s they worked only in what was false, in tinsel, and that was where little Chebe was to serve her apprenticeship to life.

For some time the new apprentice-being younger and better bred than the others—­found that they held aloof from her.  Later, as she grew older, she was admitted to their friendship and their confidence, but without ever sharing their pleasures.  She was too proud to go to see weddings at midday; and when she heard them talking of a ball at Vauxhall or the ‘Delices du Marais,’ or of a nice little supper at Bonvalet’s or at the ‘Quatre Sergents de la Rochelle,’ she was always very disdainful.

We looked higher than that, did we not, little Chebe?

Moreover, her father called for her every evening.  Sometimes, however, about the New Year, she was obliged to work late with the others, in order to complete pressing orders.  In the gaslight those pale-faced Parisians, sorting pearls as white as themselves, of a dead, unwholesome whiteness, were a painful spectacle.  There was the same fictitious glitter, the same fragility of spurious jewels.  They talked of nothing but masked balls and theatres.

“Have you seen Adele Page, in ‘Les Trois Mousquetaires?’ And Melingue?  And Marie Laurent?  Oh!  Marie Laurent!”

The actors’ doublets, the embroidered costumes of the queens of melodrama, appeared before them in the white light of the necklaces forming beneath their fingers.

In summer the work was less pressing.  It was the dull season.  In the intense heat, when through the drawn blinds fruit-sellers could be heard in the street, crying their mirabelles and Queen Claudes, the workgirls slept heavily, their heads on the table.  Or perhaps Malvina would go and ask Mademoiselle Le Mire for a copy of the ‘Journal pour Tous,’ and read aloud to the others.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Fromont and Risler — Complete from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.