And then, what does it signify whether I am alone, or accompanied? nobody meddles with me".
"Taisez-vous, et asseyez-vous là—là!" Setting down a chair with emphasis in a particularly dull corner, before a series of most specially dreary "cadres".
"Mais, monsieur?"
"Mais, mademoiselle, asseyez-vous, et ne bougez pas, entendez-vous? jusqu'à ce qu'on vienne vous chercher, ou que je vous donne la permission".
"Quel triste coin!" cried I, "et quelles laids tableaux!"
And, "laids", indeed, they were, being a set of four, denominated in the catalog "La vie d'une femme". They were painted rather in a remarkable style, flat, dead, pale and formal. The first represented a "Jeune Fille", coming out of a church door, a missal in her hand, her dress very prim, her eyes cast down, her mouth pursed up—the image of a most villainous little precocious she-hypocrite. The second, a "Mariée", with a long white veil, kneeling at a prie-dieu in her chamber, holding her hands plastered together, finger to finger, and showing the whites of her eyes in a most exasperating manner. The third, a "Jeune Mère", hanging disconsolate over a clayey and puffy baby with a face like an unwholesome full moon. The fourth, a "Veuve", being a black woman, holding by the hand a black little girl, and the twain studiously surveying an elegant French monument, set up in a corner of some Père la Chaise. All these four "Anges" were grim and gray as burglars, and cold and vapid as ghosts. What women to live with! insincere, ill-humored, bloodless, brainless nonentities! As bad in their way as the indolent gypsy-giantess, the Cleopatra, in hers.
It was impossible to keep one's attention long confined to these masterpieces, and so, by degrees, I veered round, and surveyed the gallery.
A perfect crowd of spectators was by this time gathered round the Lioness, from whose vicinage I had been banished; nearly half this crowd were ladies, but M. Paul afterwards told me, these were "des dames", and it was quite proper for them to contemplate what no "demoiselle" ought to glance at. I assured him plainly I could not agree in this doctrine, and did not see the sense of it: whereupon, with his usual absolutism, he merely requested my silence, and also,
