Unfortunately the mystery had vanished with the goddess, and, for
all their endeavours, they discovered only what was on sale since
the owner's decease, and nothing of what had been on sale during her
lifetime. For the rest, there were plenty of things worth buying. The
furniture was superb; there were rosewood and buhl cabinets and tables,
Sevres and Chinese vases, Saxe statuettes, satin, velvet, lace; there
was nothing lacking.
I sauntered through the rooms, following the inquisitive ladies of
distinction. They entered a room with Persian hangings, and I was just
going to enter in turn, when they came out again almost immediately,
smiling, and as if ashamed of their own curiosity. I was all the more
eager to see the room. It was the dressing-room, laid out with all the
articles of toilet, in which the dead woman's extravagance seemed to be
seen at its height.
On a large table against the wall, a table three feet in width and six
in length, glittered all the treasures of Aucoc and Odiot. It was a
magnificent collection, and there was not one of those thousand little
things so necessary to the toilet of a woman of the kind which was not
in gold or silver. Such a collection could only have been got together
little by little, and the same lover had certainly not begun and ended
it.
Not being shocked at the sight of a kept woman's dressing-room, I
amused myself with examining every detail, and I discovered that these
magnificently chiselled objects bore different initials and different
coronets. I looked at one after another, each recalling a separate
shame, and I said that God had been merciful to the poor child, in not
having left her to pay the ordinary penalty, but rather to die in
the midst of her beauty and luxury, before the coming of old age, the
courtesan's first death.
Is there anything sadder in the world than the old age of vice,
especially in woman? She preserves no dignity, she inspires no interest.
The everlasting repentance, not of the evil ways followed, but of the
plans that have miscarried, the money that has been spent in vain, is
as saddening a thing as one can well meet with. I knew an aged woman who
had once been "gay," whose only link with the past was a daughter almost
as beautiful as she herself had been. This poor creature to whom her
mother had never said, "You are my child," except to bid her nourish her
old age as she herself had nourished her youth, was called Louise, and,
being obedient to her mother, she abandoned herself without volition,
without passion, without pleasure, as she would have worked at any other
profession that might have been taught her.