Now what were we to make of this? A young woman going to Bruants (than which there is scarcely a shadier resort in all the shady by-ways of Bohemia)—going to Bruant’s for the first time in her life, boldly gets up, and takes part in the performance! How were we to penetrate beneath the surface of her conduct, and perceive the world of innocence, the supreme unconsciousness of evil, that lay hidden there, and accounted for it? Bruant himself, to our shame be it owned,—rough, ribald, rowdy Aristide,—saw what we were blind to.
“How the devil does she come to be knocking about with your flash mob?” he asked me, in the pauses of one of his songs; he struts hither and thither through the room, as he sings, you know and exchanges parenthetical remarks with everybody. “You’re no fit pals for the likes of her, vous autres, b———, m————!”—words that would put any English printing-machinery out of gear.
“Because she’s an honest girl, that’s all. She’s fallen among thieves, and I believe she doesn’t know it. You oughtn’t to have brought her to a sale trou like this.”
“I didn’t bring her. She came of her own free will.”
“Well, it’s some ridiculous mistake, mark what I’m telling you.” And he moved off singing the second stanza of “Saint Lazare.”
Upon the arrival of his own paid pianist, he conducted Miss back to her seat at our table, made her a grand bow, thanked her in a speech every word of which could have been found in the Academy Dictionary, and insisted upon her drinking a galopin of beer with him, and clinking glasses. She laughed and blushed a good deal; but it was plain that in her heart she was murmuring, “What fun!”
Afterwards we went to the Rat Mort for supper. Yes, heaven forgive us, we took Mademoiselle Miss to the Rat Mort for supper!
One thing, in recalling those early days, I catch myself perpetually thanking our stars for, with a joy the obverse of a terror; and that is that it was mercifully given to us to find her out before she had a chance to do the same by us. Otherwise,—if we had persisted a little longer in our error, and in our consequent modes of speech and conduct, and she had come to understand,—my heart quails to picture the hurt and mortification she would have suffered, the contempt and horror she must have felt for us. But, by a good fortune that we had certainly done nothing to deserve, our eyes were opened to her true colours in the very nick of time; and we made haste to turn over a new leaf before she had been able to spell out the old. I can hardly tell just how it began. It began probably in vague misgivings, dim surmises, that gradually waxed stronger and clearer, and were in the end confirmed by circumstances. Little questions she would ask, little comments she would make, little things she would do, struck us as odd, as hopeless to explain,—unless on an hypothesis that at first seemed quite too far-fetched, but by-and-by forced itself upon us as the only one that would in any way fit the case; the hypothesis, namely, of her stupendous innocence; that, indeed, as Bruant had divined, her presence with us was due to some preposterous misconception; that, in her own perfect soundness and honesty, she was totally unsuspicious of the corruption round about her.