Original Short Stories – Volume 13

“Ah! Tell me about it. Where were you?”

“I was at Argenteuil.”

“What were you doing?”

“I was waitress in a restaurant.”

“What restaurant?”

“‘The Freshwater Sailor.’ Do you know it?”

“I should say so, kept by Bonanfan.”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“And how did he make love to you, this boating man?”

“While I was doing his room. He took advantage of me.”

But I suddenly recalled the theory of a friend of mine, an observant and philosophical physician whom constant attendance in hospitals has brought into daily contact with girl-mothers and prostitutes, with all the shame and all the misery of women, of those poor women who have become the frightful prey of the wandering male with money in his pocket.

“A woman,” he said, “is always debauched by a man of her own class and position. I have volumes of statistics on that subject. We accuse the rich of plucking the flower of innocence among the girls of the people. This is not correct. The rich pay for what they want. They may gather some, but never for the first time.”

Then, turning to my companion, I began to laugh.

“You know that I am aware of your history. The boating man was not the first.”

“Oh, yes, my dear, I swear it:”

“You are lying, my dear.”

“Oh, no, I assure you.”

“You are lying; come, tell me all.”

She seemed to hesitate in astonishment. I continued:

“I am a sorcerer, my dear girl, I am a clairvoyant. If you do not tell me the truth, I will go into a trance sleep and then I can find out.”

She was afraid, being as stupid as all her kind. She faltered:

“How did you guess?”

“Come, go on telling me,” I said.

“Oh, the first time didn’t amount to anything.

“There was a festival in the country. They had sent for a special chef, M. Alexandre. As soon as he came he did just as he pleased in the house. He bossed every one, even the proprietor and his wife, as if he had been a king. He was a big handsome man, who did not seem fitted to stand beside a kitchen range. He was always calling out, ‘Come, some butter – some eggs – some Madeira!’ And it had to be brought to him at once in a hurry, or he would get cross and say things that would make us blush all over.

“When the day was over he would smoke a pipe outside the door. And as I was passing by him with a pile of plates he said to me, like that: ‘Come, girlie, come down to the water with me and show me the country.’ I went with him like a fool, and we had hardly got down to the bank of the river when he took advantage of me so suddenly that I did not even know what he was doing. And then he went away on the nine o’clock train. I never saw him again.”

“Is that all?” I asked.

She hesitated.

“Oh, I think Florentin belongs to him.”

“Who is Florentin?”

“My little boy.”

“Oh! Well, then, you made the boating man believe that he was the father, did you not?”

“You bet!”

“Did he have any money, this boating man?”

“Yes, he left me an income of three hundred francs, settled on Florentin.”

I was beginning to be amused and resumed:

“All right, my girl, all right. You are all of you less stupid than one would imagine, all the same. And how old is he now, Florentin?”

She replied:

“He is now twelve. He will make his first communion in the spring.”

“That is splendid. And since then you have carried on your business conscientiously?”

She sighed in a resigned manner.

“I must do what I can.”

But a loud noise just then coming from the room itself made me start up with a bound. It sounded like some one falling and picking themselves up again by feeling along the wall with their hands.

I had seized the candle and was looking about me, terrified and furious. She had risen also and was trying to hold me back to stop me, murmuring:

“That’s nothing, my dear, I assure you it’s nothing.”

But I had discovered what direction the strange noise came from. I walked straight towards a door hidden at the head of the bed and I opened it abruptly and saw before me, trembling, his bright, terrified eyes opened wide at sight of me, a little pale, thin boy seated beside a large wicker chair off which he had fallen.

As soon as he saw me he began to cry. Stretching out his arms to his mother, he cried:

“It was not my fault, mamma, it was not my fault. I was asleep, and I fell off. Do not scold me, it was not my fault.”

I turned to the woman and said:

“What does this mean?”