The mahogany furniture was covered with red plush, the floor was polished and engravings of battles decorated the walls.

O Virtue! you are beautiful, for very stupid is vice.

The woman who was sitting by my side had hands which were sufficient in themselves to make a man forget her sex, and not knowing how to spend our time we treated the whole company to drinks.

Then I lighted a cigar, stretched out on the divan, and, sad and depressed, while the voices of the women rose shrilly and the glasses were being drained, I said to myself: Where is she?
Where can she be?
Is she dead to the world, and will men never see her again?
She was beautiful, in olden times, when she walked up the steps leading to the temple, when on her shell-like feet fell the golden fringe of her tunic, or when she lounged among Persian cushions, twirling her collar of cameos and chatting with the wise men and the philosophers.
She was beautiful when she stood naked on the threshold of her _cella_ in the street of Suburra, under the rosin torchlight that blazed in the night, slowly chanting her Campanian lay, while from the Tiber came the refrains of the orgies.
She was beautiful, too, in her old house of the _Cite_ behind the Gothic windows, among the noisy students and dissipated monks, when, without fear of the sergeants, they struck the oaken tables with their pewter mugs, and the worm-eaten beds creaked beneath the weight of their bodies.
She was beautiful when she leaned over the green cloth and coveted the gold of the provincials; then she wore high heels and had a small waist and a large wig which shed its perfumed powder on her shoulders, a rose over her ear and a patch on her cheek.
She was beautiful also among the goat-skins of the Cossacks and the English uniforms, pushing her way through the throngs of men and letting her bare shoulders dazzle them on the steps of the gambling houses, under the jewellers' windows, beneath the lights of the cafes, between starvation and wealth.
What are you regretting?
I am regretting the _fille de joie_.
On the boulevard, one evening, I caught a glimpse of her as she passed under the gaslight, with watchful and eager eyes, dragging her feet over the sidewalk.

I saw her pale face on the street-corner, while the rain wet the flowers in her hair, and heard her soft voice calling to the men, while her flesh shivered in her low-necked bodice.
It was her last day; after that she disappeared.
Fear not that she will ever return, for she is dead, quite dead! Her dress is made high, she has morals, objects to coarse language, and puts the sous she earns in a savings bank.
Cleared of her presence, the street has lost the only poetry it still retained; they have filtered the gutter and sorted the garbage.
In a little while, the mountebanks will also have disappeared, in order to make room for magnetic _seances_ and reform banquets, and the rope-dancer with her spangled skirt and long balancing-pole will be as remote from us as the bayadere of the Ganges.
Of all that beautiful, glittering world as flighty as fancy itself, so melancholy and sonorous, so bitter and yet so gay, full of inward pathos and glaring sarcasms, where misery was warm and grace was sad, the last vestige of a lost age, a distant race, which, we are told, came from the other end of the earth and brought us in the tinkling of its bells the echo and vague memory of idolised joys; some covered wagon moving slowly along the road, with rolled tents on its roof and muddy dogs beneath it, a man in a yellow jacket, selling _muscade_ in tin cups, the poor marionnettes in the Champs-Elysees, and the mandolin players who visit the cafes in the outskirts of the city, are all that is left.
Since then, it is true, we have had a number of farces of a higher class of humour.