The Crazy Corner by Jean Richepin

Author:Jean Richepin [Richepin, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Coat Press
Published: 2013-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

With that, he smiled and turned to the waiter who had just come in. “In the meantime,” he said, “open us another bottle of champagne—and make the cork pop. That will accustom us a little, won’t it, for the day when we all go pop ourselves?”

La Morillonne

They called her La Morillonne57 because of her black hair, her complexion gilded like Autumn leaves, and her mouth with thick violet-tinted lips, which resembled a mulberry when they were pursed.

It was a mystery of atavism that she had been born with that Moorish appearance among a fair-haired people, engendered by a father and mother with flaxen hair and buttery skin. One of her ancestors must have sinned with one of those wandering coppersmiths who had been passing through the region since time immemorial, with swarthy and indigo faces, coiffed in spongy steel wool—and from that ancestor she had, not merely her dark face, but also her dark soul and her treacherous eyes, in which that troubled soul lurked: eyes in which the night lit up, at times, with flashes of all the vices; the eyes of a perverse and malevolent beast.

Beautiful? No—not even merely pretty. Ugly, absolutely ugly. Such a false gaze! A bulbous snub-nose. A mouth like an unhealthy, rotten fruit, always drooling with greed, from which evil words hissed. A hirsute and dirtily frizzy head, a nest of vermin. And the whole on a thin, feverish body, badly-molded in flesh, built askew, with a creeping gait.

In brief, a monster!

With that monster, however, all the lads of the locality had lain, and whoever tasted her wanted to do it again.

As soon as she began to learn the catechism she had become the commodity of the village. Children of her own age had been corrupted by her, taken into alleyways and behind barns, under the pretext of bird’s-nesting or blind man’s bluff, and came back home with love-bites. Young men too, at the risk of prison, and even serious men, old, notable and venerable, such as the farmer des Eclausiaux and the former mayor Monsieur Martin, and others, and better, were ensnared by her, by the slut’s imperious petticoat. If the garde-champêtre had not hauled her up in court, in spite of his love of legal procedure, it was only because, it was said, he would have been hauled up in court himself.

And so she had grown up in impunity, the official mistress of each and everyone, as the local schoolmaster put it—who had been included therein himself.

The most curious part of the story is that no one was jealous of her. Everyone passed her around. When someone chanced to express astonishment on that score one day, she had replied to the unintelligent foreigner: “Isn’t there enough for everyone?”

How in any case, would a jealous individual wanting to monopolize her have gone about it? There was nothing with which to hold her. She was not self-interested, Gifts and money she accepted gladly, but never asked for them. One might even have thought that she preferred not to ask for them, but to pay herself in her own fashion, by stealing.

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