And the excessive mobility of her caprices, the little care she took to look at the purse and the boots of those who wished to be considered amongst them, brought about a corresponding mobility in her existence which was a perpetual alternation of blue broughams and omnibuses, first floors and fifth stories, silken gowns and cotton frocks.

Oh cleaning girl! Living poem of youth with ringing laugh and joyous song! Tender heart beating for one and all beneath your half-open bodice! Ah Mademoiselle Musette, sister of Bernette and Mimi Pinson, it would need the pen of Alfred de Musset to fitly narrate your careless and vagabond course amidst the flowery paths of youth; and he would certainly have celebrated you, if like me, he had heard you sing in your pretty false notes, this couplet from one of your favorite ditties: "It was a day in Spring When love I strove to sing Unto a nut brown maid.
O'er face as fair as dawn Cast a bewitching shade," The story we are about to tell is one of the most charming in the life of this charming adventuress who wore so many green gowns.
At a time when she was the mistress of a young Counsellor of State, who had gallantly placed in her hands the key of his ancestral coffers, Mademoiselle Musette was in the habit of receiving once a week in her pretty drawing room in the Rue de la Bruyere.

These evenings resembled most Parisian evenings, with the difference that people amused themselves.

When there was not enough room they sat on one another's knees, and it often happened that the same glass served for two.
Rodolphe, who was a friend of Musette and never anything more than a friend, without either of them knowing why--Rodolphe asked leave to bring his friend, the painter Marcel.
"A young fellow of talent," he added, "for whom the future is embroidering his Academician's coat." "Bring him," said Musette.
The evening they were to go together to Musette's Rodolphe called on Marcel to fetch him.

The artist was at his toilet.
"What!" said Rodolphe, "you are going into society in a colored shirt ?" "Does that shock custom ?" observed Marcel quietly.
"Shock custom, it stuns it." "The deuce," said Marcel, looking at his shirt, which displayed a pattern of boars pursued by dogs, on a blue ground.