Nor did I advance matters by talking to her seriously. I recall one special effort to impress upon her the great misery she was preparing for herself by her shiftlessness. I had given her a pair of shoes, though I had vowed a hundred times to give her nothing more, and I used the occasion for a lecture. She seemed eager to interrupt once or twice, and I flattered myself my words were having their effect. And now what had she to say? I asked when my eloquence was exhausted. She giggled: "Would _Madame_ look at her feet in _Madame's_ shoes? _Jamais je ne me suis vue si bien chaussée_," and she was going straight to the _Quartier_ "_pour éblouir le monde_," she said. When Augustine took her in hand, though Augustine's eloquence had a vigour mine could not boast of, the result was, if anything, more discouraging. Clémentine, made bold by custom, would turn a hand-spring or dance a jig, or go through the other accomplishments she had picked up in the slums.
If I could discover any weak spot by which I could reach her, I used to think something might be gained, and I lost much time in studying how to work upon her emotions. But her emotions were as far to seek as her morals. Even family ties, usually so strong in France, had no hold upon her. If she adored her little Ernest, it was because he brought her in three shillings and sixpence a week. There was no adoration for her little girl who occasionally wrote from the Pas-de-Calais and asked her for money. I saw one of the child's letters in which she implored Clémentine to pay for a white veil and white shoes; she was going to make her first communion, and the good adopted mother could pay for no more than the gown. The First Communion is the greatest event in the French child's life; there could be no deeper disgrace than not to be dressed for it, and the appeal must have moved every mother who read it, except Clémentine. To her it was comic, and she disposed of it with giggles: "_C'est drôle quand même, d'avoir une fille de cet âge_," and funnier that she could be expected to pay for anything for anybody.
But if her family awoke in her no sentiment, her "home" did, though it was of the kind that Lamb would have classed with the "no homes." The tenacity with which she clung to it was her nearest approach to strong feeling. I suppose it was because she had so long climbed the stairs of others that she took such complete satisfaction in the two shabby little rooms to which she gave the name. I had a glimpse of them, never to be forgotten, once when she failed to come for two days, and I went to look her up. The street reeked with the smell of fried fish and onions; it was filled with barrows of kippers and haddocks and whelks; it was lined with old-clothes shops; it was crowded with frowzy women and horribly dirty children. And the halls and stairs of the tenement where she lived were black with London smoke and greasy with London dirt. I did not feel clean afterwards until I had had a bath, and it was never again as easy to reconcile myself to Clémentine's daily reappearance in our midst. But to her the rooms were home, and for that reason she would have stayed on in a grimier and more malodorous neighbourhood, if such a thing could be, in preference to living in the cleanest and freshest London workhouse at the rate-payers' expense. Her objection to going into service except as a charwoman was that she would have to stay the night. "_Je ne serais pas chez moi_"; and much as she prized her comfort, it was not worth the sacrifice. On the contrary, she was prepared to sacrifice her comfort, dear as it was to her, that she might retain her home. She actually went to the length of taking in as companion an Italian workman she met by accident, not because he offered to marry her, which he did not, but because, according to his representations, he was making twenty-five shillings a week and would help to pay the rent. "_Je serais chez moi_," was now her argument, and for food she could continue to work or beg. He would be a convenience, _voilà tout_. The Italian stayed a week. He lounged in bed all morning while she was at work, he smoked all afternoon. At the end of the week Clémentine sent him flying. "_Je suis bête et je mourrais bête_," was her explanation to me; but she was not _bête_ to the point of adding an idle fourth to her burden, and, as a result, being turned out of the home she had taken him in to preserve.