XVI

There was a ball at the Boule-Noire one Thursday. The dancing was in full blast.

The ballroom had the ordinary appearance of modern places of amusement for the people. It was brilliant with false richness and tawdry splendor. There were paintings there, and tables at which wine was sold, gilded chandeliers and glasses that held a quartern of brandy, velvet hangings and wooden benches, the shabbiness and rusticity of an alehouse with the decorations of a cardboard palace.

Garnet velvet lambrequins with a fringe of gold lace hung at the windows and were economically copied in paint beneath the mirrors, which were lighted by three-branched candelabra. On the walls, in large white panels, pastoral scenes by Boucher, surrounded with painted frames, alternated with Prud’hon’s Seasons, which were much astonished to find themselves in such a place; and above the windows and doors dropsical Loves gamboled among five roses protruding from a pomade jar of the sort used by suburban hairdressers. Square pillars, embellished with meagre arabesques, supported the ceiling in the centre of the hall, where there was a small octagonal stand containing the orchestra. An oaken rail, waist high, which served as a back to a cheap red bench, enclosed the dancers. And against this rail, on the outside, were tables painted green and two rows of benches, surrounding the dance with a café.

In the dancers’ enclosure, beneath the fierce glare and the intense heat of the gas, were women of all sorts, dressed in dark, worn, rumpled woolens, women in black tulle caps, women in black paletots, women in caracos worn shiny at the seams, women in fur tippets bought of open-air dealers and in shops in dark alleys. And in the whole assemblage not one of the youthful faces was set off by a collar, not a glimpse of a white skirt could be seen among the whirling dancers, not a glimmer of white about these women, who were all dressed in gloomy colors, the colors of want, to the ends of their unpolished shoes. This absence of linen gave to the ball an aspect as of poverty in mourning; it imparted to all the faces a touch of gloom and uncleanness, of lifelessness and earthiness⁠—a vaguely forbidding aspect, in which there was a suggestion of the Hôtel-Dieu and the Mont-de-Piété!

An old woman in a wig with the hair parted at the side passed in front of the tables, with a basket filled with pieces of Savoy cake and red apples.

From time to time the dance, in its twisting and turning, disclosed a soiled stocking, the typical Jewish features of a street pedlar of sponges, red fingers protruding from black mitts, a swarthy moustached face, an under-petticoat soiled with the mud of night before last, a secondhand-skirt, stiff and crumpled, of flowered calico, the cast-off finery of some kept mistress.

The men wore paletots, small, soft caps pulled down over their ears, and woolen comforters untied and hanging down their backs. They invited the women to dance by pulling them by the cap ribbons that fluttered behind them. Some few, in hats and frockcoats and colored shirts, had an insolent air of domesticity and a swagger befitting grooms in some great family.

Everybody was jumping and bustling about. The women frisked and capered and gamboled, excited and stimulated by the spur of bestial pleasure. And in the evolutions of the contradance, one could hear brothel addresses given: Impasse du Dépotoir.

Germinie entered the hall just at the conclusion of a quadrille to the air of La Casquette du père Bugeaud, in which the cymbals, the sleigh-bells and the drum had infected the dancers with the giddiness and madness of their uproar. At a glance she embraced the whole room, all the men leading their partners back to the places marked by their caps: she had been misled; he was not there, she could not see him. However, she waited. She entered the dancers’ enclosure and sat down on the end of a bench, trying not to seem too much embarrassed. From their linen caps she judged that the women seated in line beside her were servants like herself: comrades of her own class alarmed her less than the little brazen-faced hussies, with their hair in nets and their hands in the pockets of their paletots, who strolled humming about the room. But soon she aroused hostile attention, even on her bench. Her hat⁠—only about a dozen women at the ball wore hats⁠—her flounced skirt, the white hem of which could be seen under her dress, the gold brooch that secured her shawl awakened malevolent curiosity all about her. Glances and smiles were bestowed upon her that boded her no good. All the women seemed to be asking one another where this new arrival had come from, and to be saying to one another that she would take their lovers from them. Young women who were walking about the hall in pairs, with their arms about one another’s waists as if for a waltz, made her lower her eyes as they passed in front of her, and then went on with a contemptuous shrug, turning their heads to look back at her.

She changed her place: she was met with the same smiles, the same whispering, the same hostility. She went to the further end of the hall; all the women looked after her; she felt as if she were enveloped in malicious, envious glances, from the hem of her dress to the flowers on her hat. Her face flushed. At times she feared that she should weep. She longed to leave the place, but she lacked courage to walk the length of the hall all alone.

She began mechanically to watch an old woman who was slowly making the circuit of the hall with a noiseless step, like a bird of night flying in a circle. A black hat, of the hue of charred paper, confined her bandeaux of grizzled hair. From her square, high masculine shoulders, hung a sombre-hued Scotch tartan. When she reached the door, she cast a last glance about the hall, that embraced everyone therein, with the eye of a vulture seeking in vain for food.

Suddenly there was an outcry: a police officer was ejecting a diminutive youth who tried to bite his hands and clung to the tables, against which, as he was dragged along, he struck with a noise like breaking furniture.

As Germinie turned her head she spied Jupillon: he was sitting between two women at a green table in a window-recess, smoking. One of the two was a tall blonde with a small quantity of frizzled flaxen hair, a flat, stupid face and round eyes. A red flannel chemise lay in folds on her back, and she had both hands in the pockets of a black apron which she was flapping up and down on her dark red skirt. The other, a short, dark creature, whose face was still red from having been scrubbed with soap, was enveloped as to her head, with the coquetry of a fish-woman, in a white knitted hood with a blue border.

Jupillon had recognized Germinie. When he saw her rise and approach him, with her eyes fixed upon his face, he whispered something to the woman in the hood, rested his elbows defiantly on the table and waited.

“Hallo! you here,” he exclaimed when Germinie stood before him, erect, motionless and mute. “This is a surprise!⁠—Waiter! another bowl!”

And, emptying the bowl of sweetened wine into the two women’s glasses, he continued: “Come, don’t make up faces⁠—sit down there.”

And, as Germinie did not budge: “Go on! These ladies are friends of mine⁠—ask them!”

“Mélie,” said the woman in the hood to the other woman, in a voice like a diseased crow’s, “don’t you see? She’s monsieur’s mother. Make room for the lady if she’d like to drink with us.”

Germinie cast a murderous glance at the woman.

“Well! what’s the matter?” the woman continued; “that don’t suit you, madame, eh? Excuse me! you ought to have told me beforehand. How old do you suppose she is, Mélie, eh? Sapristi! You select young ones, my boy, you don’t put yourself out!”

Jupillon smiled internally, and simpered and sneered externally. His whole manner displayed the cowardly delight that evil-minded persons take in watching the suffering of those who suffer because of loving them.

“I have something to say to you⁠—to you!⁠—not here⁠—outside,” said Germinie.

“Much joy to you! Coming, Mélie?” said the woman in the hood, lighting the stub of a cigar that Jupillon had left on the table beside a piece of lemon.

“What do you want?” said Jupillon, impressed, in spite of himself, by Germinie’s tone.

“Come!”

And she walked on ahead of him. As she passed, the people crowded about her, laughing. She heard voices, broken sentences, subdued hooting.