The
latter was twenty-five years old and very passionless and was held to be
one of the finest women it is possible to enjoy. Her price never varied.
The mother, a model of orderliness, kept the accounts and noted down
receipts and expenditures with severe precision. She managed the whole
household from some small lodging two stories above her daughter's,
where, moreover, she had established a workroom for dressmaking and
plain sewing. As to Blanche de Sivry, whose real name was Jacqueline
Bandu, she hailed from a village near Amiens. Magnificent in person,
stupid and untruthful in character, she gave herself out as the
granddaughter of a general and never owned to her thirty-two summers.
The Russians had a great taste for her, owing to her embonpoint. Then
Daguenet added a rapid word or two about the rest. There was Clarisse
Besnus, whom a lady had brought up from Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer in the
capacity of maid while the lady's husband had started her in quite
another line. There was Simonne Cabiroche, the daughter of a furniture
dealer in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, who had been educated in a large
boarding school with a view to becoming a governess. Finally there were
Maria Blond and Louise Violaine and Lea de Horn, who had all shot up to
woman's estate on the pavements of Paris, not to mention Tatan Nene, who
had herded cows in Champagne till she was twenty.
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