Long before our personal acquaintance began I used to see her here and there in the Quarter: at the Bullier balls, or the Café Vachette, or in the Luxembourg or the Boule-Miche when the weather was fine: and to admire her as a singularly inoffensive specimen of her class. Those were her palmy days. Her “friend” was a student of law, from the Quartier Marbouf, with a pocketful of money and a pointed beard. She was the smallest of possible little women, no higher than her law-student’s heart, if he had one; and he was only a medium-sized Frenchman. She was very daintily formed, with fine hands and feet; she had a great quantity of black hair, and a pair of bright black eyes. Her face was pale, and decidedly an interesting face: pert, if you please, and tremendously mischievous, but suggestive of wit, of intelligence, even of humour and passion: a most uncommon face, with character in it,—I believe I may even say with distinction. It was a face you would have noticed anywhere, to wonder who and what its owner might be. And then she used to dress very well, very quietly: in refined grays or blacks: there was absolutely nothing in her dress to betray her place in the world’s economy: passing her in the street, you would have taken her for an entirely irreproachable little housewife, with an unusually interesting face. I used to see her in all the pleasure-resorts of the Quarter, ami to admire her, and speculate about her in a languid, melancholy way. Then I left town for the summer; and when I came back last September I established myself here in the Hôtel du Saint Esprit.
The first morning after my arrival I was awakened by queer but unambiguous noises coming through that door, there behind my armoire; a strident laugh, and a few hardy exclamations, that could leave me in no doubt as to the sex and quality of my fellow-lodger. An hour or two later I encountered Zizi on the landing; and the concierge informed me that she was the tenant of the next room to my own. Such a neighbourship would horrify you in London or New York: but we think nothing of accidents much worse than that, here in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Afterwards, night and morning, and more especially in those small hours that are properly both or neither, I would hear Zizi’s laughter beyond our dividing door; her laughter, or her thin little voice raised in a stupid song, or the murmur of light talk, that would sometimes leap to the pitch of anger, for I suspect that Zizi’s temper was uncertain; and then, rare at first, but recurring more and more frequently, till it became quite the dominant note, her hard, dry, racking little cough.