own mother. She used to be a concierge, but she's not
without intelligence. Call her Madame; she makes a point of it."

Florentine happened that night to have a friend with her,--a certain
Marie Godeschal, beautiful as an angel, cold as a danseuse, and a
pupil of Vestris, who foretold for her a great choregraphic destiny.
Mademoiselle Godeschal, anxious to make her first appearance at the
Panorama-Dramatique under the name of Mariette, based her hopes on the
protection and influence of a first gentleman of the bedchamber, to whom
Vestris had promised to introduce her. Vestris, still green himself at
this period, did not think his pupil sufficiently trained to risk the
introduction. The ambitious girl did, in the end, make her pseudonym of
Mariette famous; and the motive of her ambition, it must be said, was
praiseworthy. She had a brother, a clerk in Derville's law office. Left
orphans and very poor, and devoted to each other, the brother and sister
had seen life such as it is in Paris. The one wished to be a lawyer that
he might support his sister, and he lived on ten sous a day; the other
had coldly resolved to be a dancer, and to profit by her beauty as much
as by her legs that she might buy a practice for her brother. Outside
of their feeling for each other, and of their mutual life and interests,
everything was to them, as it once was to the Romans and the Hebrews,
barbaric, outlandish, and hostile. This generous affection, which
nothing ever lessened, explained Mariette to those who knew her
intimately.

The brother and sister were living at this time on the eighth floor of a
house in the Vieille rue du Temple. Mariette had begun her studies
when she was ten years old; she was now just sixteen. Alas! for want of
becoming clothes, her beauty, hidden under a coarse shawl, dressed
in calico, and ill-kept, could only be guessed by those Parisians
who devote themselves to hunting grisettes and the quest of beauty in
misfortune, as she trotted past them with mincing step, mounted on iron
pattens. Philippe fell in love with Mariette. To Mariette, Philippe was
commander of the dragoons of the Guard, a staff-officer of the Emperor,
a young man of twenty-seven, and above all, the means of proving herself
superior to Florentine by the evident superiority of Philippe over
Giroudeau. Florentine and Giroudeau, the one to promote his comrade's
happiness, the other to get a protector for her friend, pushed Philippe
and Mariette