alf bees,
half grasshoppers, who sang at their work all week, only asked God for a
little sunshine on Sunday, loved with all their heart, and sometimes
threw themselves out of a window.

A breed that is now lost, thanks to the present generation of young
fellows, a corrupted and at the same time corrupting race, but, above
everything, vain, foolish and brutal. For the sake of uttering spiteful
paradoxes, they chaffed these poor girls about their hands, disfigured
by the sacred scars of toil, and as a consequence these soon no longer
earned even enough to buy almond paste. By degrees they succeeded in
inoculating them with their own foolishness and vanity, and then the
grisette disappeared. It was then that the lorette sprung up. A hybrid
breed of impertinent creatures of mediocre beauty, half flesh, half
paint, whose boudoir is a shop in which they sell bits of their heart
like slices of roast beef. The majority of these girls who dishonor
pleasure, and are the shame of modern gallantry, are not always equal in
intelligence to the very birds whose feathers they wear in their
bonnets. If by chance they happen to feel, not love nor even a caprice,
but a common place desire, it is for some counter jumping mountebank,
whom the crowd surrounds and applauds at public balls, and whom the
papers, courtiers of all that is ridiculous, render celebrated by their
puffs. Although she was obliged to live in this circle Musette had
neither its manners nor its ways, she had not the servile cupidity of
those creatures who can only read Cocker and only write in figures. She
was an intelligent and witty girl, and some drops of the blood of Mansu
in her veins and, rebellious to all yokes, she had never been able to
help yielding to a fancy, whatever might be the consequences.

Marcel was really the only man she had ever loved. He was at any rate
the only one for whose sake she had really suffered, and it had needed
all the stubbornness of the instincts that attracted her to all that
glittered and jingled to make her leave him. She was twenty, and for her
luxury was almost a matter of existence. She might do without it for a
time, but she could not give it up completely. Knowing her inconstancy,
she had never consented to padlock her heart with an oath of fidelity.
She had been ardently loved by many young fellows for whom she had
herself felt a strong fancy, and she had always acted towards them with
far-sighted probity; the engagements i