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.

The constant sight of dissipation, precocious dissipation, in addition
to her constant sickly state, had extinguished in her mind all the
knowledge of good and evil that God had perhaps given her, but that no
one had ever thought of developing. I shall always remember her, as
she passed along the boulevards almost every day at the same hour,
accompanied by her mother as assiduously as a real mother might have
accompanied her daughter. I was very young then, and ready to accept for
myself the easy morality of the age. I remember, however, the
contempt and disgust which awoke in me at the sight of this scandalous
chaperoning. Her face, too, was inexpressibly virginal in its expression
of innocence and of melancholy suffering. She was like a figure of
Resignation.

One day the girl's face was transfigured. In the midst of all the
debauches mapped out by her mother, it seemed to her as if God had left
over for her one happiness. And why indeed should God, who had made her
without strength, have left her without consolation, under the sorrowful
burden of her life? One day, then, she realized that she was to have