“What was that noise?”
She answered quietly and confidently:
“Do not be uneasy, my dear boy, it is my neighbor. The partition is so
thin that one can hear everything as if it were in the room. These are
wretched rooms, just like pasteboard.”
I felt so lazy that I paid no further attention to it. We resumed our
conversation. Driven by the stupid curiosity that prompts all men to
question these creatures about their first experiences, to attempt to
lift the veil of their first folly, as though to find in them a trace
of pristine innocence, to love them, possibly, in a fleeting memory of
their candor and modesty of former days, evoked by a word, I insistently
asked her about her earlier lovers.
I knew she was telling me lies. What did it matter? Among all these lies
I might, perhaps, discover something sincere and pathetic.
“Come,” said I, “tell me who he was.”
“He was a boating man, my dear.”
“Ah! Tell me about it. Where were you?”
“I was at Argenteuil.”
“What were you doing?”
“I was waitress in a restaurant.”
“What restaurant?”
“'The Freshwater Sailor.' Do you know it?”
“I should say so, kept by Bonanfan.”
“Yes, that's it.”
“And how did he make love to you, this boating man?”
“While I was doing his room. He took advantage of me.”
But I suddenly recalled the theory of a friend of mine, an observant
and philosophical physician whom constant attendance in hospitals has
brought into daily contact with girl-mothers and prostitutes, with all
the shame and all the misery of women, of those poor women who have
become the frightful prey of the wandering male with money in his
pocket.
“A woman,” he said, “is always debauched by a man of her own class and
position. I have volumes of statistics on that subject. We accuse the
rich of plucking the flower of innocence among the girls of the people.
This is not correct. The rich pay for what they want. They may gather
some, but never for the first time.”
Then, turning to my companion, I began to laugh.
“You know that I am aware of your history. The boating man was not the
first.”
“Oh, yes, my dear, I swear it:”
“You are lying, my dear.”
“Oh, no, I assure you.”
“You are lying; come, tell me all.”
She seemed to hesitate in astonishment. I continued:
“I am a sorcerer, my dear girl, I am a clairvoyant. If you do not tell
me the truth, I will go into a trance sleep and then I can find out.”
She was afraid, being as stupid as all her kind. She faltered:
“How did you guess?”
“Come, go on telling me,” I said.
“Oh, the first time didn't amount to anything.
“There was a festival in the country. They had sent for a special chef,
M. Alexandre. As soon as he came he did just as he pleased in the house.
He bossed every one, even the proprietor and his wife, as if he had
been a king. He was a big handsome man, who did not seem fitted to stand
beside a kitchen range. He was always calling out, 'Come, some butter
--some eggs--some Madeira!' And it had to be brought to him at once in a
hurry, or he would get cross and say things that would make us blush all
over.
“When the day was over he would smoke a pipe outside the door. And as
I was passing by him with a pile of plates he said to me, like that:
'Come, girlie, come down to the water with me and show me the country.'
I went with him like a fool, and we had hardly got down to the bank of
the river when he took advantage of me so suddenly that I did not even
know what he was doing. And then he went away on the nine o'clock train.
I never saw him again.”
“Is that all?” I asked.
She hesitated.
“Oh, I think Florentin belongs to him.”
“Who is Florentin?”
“My little boy.”
“Oh! Well, then, you made the boating man believe that he was the
father, did you not?”
“You bet!”
“Did he have any money, this boating man?”
“Yes, he left me an income of three hundred francs, settled on
Florentin.”