The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. by Carole DeSanti Page B

to follow us and pluck at her shawl. “You know me, madame. You know me,” she cried, and I started, and stared. Because she looked so like the young, pale-browed woman who had also been, briefly, at the Tivoli. Or perhaps I was mistaken. An officer stepped forward and seized her before I could be sure.
    Â 
    â€œMy things, where are my
things?
” I was back in the bric-a-brac parlor, sobbing and furious, now dressed only in a camisole, the other garments having been peremptorily stripped.
    â€œ
Calmez, calmez!”
The woman who confronted me now had a broad Germanic brow, balmy, pale gray eyes; white-blonde hair piled on her head; and a voice as cool as a cloth dipped in water. She handed me a substantial square of linen, a man’s handkerchief. From Françoise’s rattling discourse I had surmised that my immediate destiny lay in the hands of this Madame Jouffroy who was now towering over me and saying, drily, “Excellent . . . Our enterprising submistress has violated every statute in Paris bringing you in here. Do you want to tell me what kind of trouble you’ve gotten yourself into?”
    She moved to the windows, slid open the draperies. The windowpanes were colored glass: blue and gray, red and violet, like disarranged church windows. They let in a muted light, illuminating the bits and pieces of finery strewn about as well as her own attire, a kind of morning coat embroidered with birds.
    â€œThis is not a hotel and I will not have entrepreneurs incurring fines on my behalf. You can try to come up with a novelty, but these walls have seen it all. Well, whatever it is—let me tell you something. You are not the first and will not be the last. So? Difficulties with a man? And with money?”
    Uneasily I folded my arms around my body; the flimsy shift was unpleasant. Madame Jouffroy’s tone suggested that I was the perpetrator of my trouble and not its victim, an idea from which I jerked back like a hand that had touched a hot stove.
    â€œAll you innocents, you think that everyone in the world has your best interests at heart. Ah, and why not? A girl might fall in love, yes? Then one day she wakes up with the dogs at her heels. How many of these girls do you think there are? You, alone? Half a dozen, a hundred? I’ll tell you: thousands.
    â€œOh, they will run after him, or run away from home to go begging in the streets, or go crying to Maman. Then the police catch them with nets and stock the prison cells; or they find comfort in the madhouses, which are stuffed full. Their children fill the hospice and staff the factories—there, have you stopped crying? See, you are not so badly off. And do you know the reason for all of this trouble?” I sniffed, and stared at her. The dusty, bookish odor was tickling my nose. “You do not know the world, and you do not know men.”
    The sneeze came, violently. The room smelled damp and inky; later I would come to understand it was the odor of a bank vault.
    Madame Jouffroy went on. “So now, do you think you can wander Paris, trying your luck, without attracting the attention of the police?”
    â€œNo—I don’t know what you mean!”
    â€œMogador was born right over there on the rue des Puits. No older than you when she was inscribed, went on the Register, and began her career at a tolerated house on this very street. But she kept her wits about her, played out her hand, and now she is the Comtesse de Chabrillan. Léonide LeBlanc was a stonebreaker’s daughter from the Loiret. The man didn’t break only stone; I saw the scars on her back. Now
she
needs a shovel to count her diamonds. This Mademoiselle Pearl who is so popular now—she was born Crouch in the isle of nowhere. She carried a
carte,
whether or not you want to believe it, and now she beds down at the Tuileries—or so they say. What do you think distinguishes the women who choose their lovers, name their