OF FLEURETTE

One day, when Aristide was discoursing on the inexhaustible subject of
woman, I pulled him up.

"My good friend," said I, "you seem to have fallen in love with every
woman you have ever met. But for how many of them have you really
cared?"

"_Mon Dieu!_ For all of them!" he cried, springing from his chair and
making a wind-mill of himself.

"Come, come," said I; "all that amorousness is just Gallic exuberance.
Have you ever been really in love in your life?"

"How should I know?" said he. But he lit a cigarette, turned away, and
looked out of window.

There was a short silence. He shrugged his shoulders, apparently in
response to his own thoughts. Then he turned again suddenly, threw his
cigarette into the fire, and thrust his hands into his pockets. He
sighed.

"Perhaps there was Fleurette," said he, not looking at me. "_Est-ce
qu'on sait jamais?_ That wasn't her real name--it was Marie-Josephine;
but people called her Fleurette. She looked like a flower, you know."

I nodded in order to signify my elementary acquaintance with the French
tongue.

"The most delicate little flower you can conceive," he continued.
"_Tiens_, she was a slender lily--so white, and her hair the flash of
gold on it--and she had eyes--_des yeux de pervenche_, as we say in
French. What is _pervenche_ in English--that little pale-blue flower?"

"Periwinkle," said I.

"Periwinkle eyes! My God, what a language! Ah, no! She had _des yeux de
pervenche_.... She was _diaphane_, diaphanous ... impalpable as
cigarette-smoke ... a little nose like nothing at all, with nostrils
like infinitesimal sea-shells. Anyone could have made a mouthful of
her.... Ah! _Cre nom d'un chien!_ Life is droll. It has no common sense.
It is the game of a mountebank.... I've never told you about Fleurette.
It was this way."

And the story he narrated I will do my best to set down.

* * * * *

The good M. Bocardon, of the Hotel de la Curatterie at Nimes, whose
grateful devotion to Aristide has already been recorded, had a brother
in Paris who managed the Hotel du Soleil et de l'Ecosse (strange
conjuncture), a flourishing third-rate hostelry in the neighbourhood of
the Halles Centrales. Thither flocked sturdy Britons in knickerbockers,
stockings, and cloth caps, Teutons with tin botanizing boxes (for lunch
transportation), and American school-marms realizing at last the dream
of their modest and laborious lives.