Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 3.djvu/120

 toes of La Grève. It is in this catalogue of courtesans, that are to be found those damsels who form the delight of the paviors, messengers, and water-bearers: kept by the libertines of this laborious class, whose liberalities form their main chance, they, in their turns, when not smitten by some fencing-master, or street-singer, support the thieves, or, at least, if they are in good keeping, by way of return, they comfort them during their dungeon woes, and in the dead season of the year.

The comrade of the princess Caroline, Emilie Simonet, or madame Hotot, was one of this stamp; hers was a kind heart perverted; I met her at mother Bariole's. Mother Bariole, a good woman, if there ever was one, and as honest as it was possible in her profession, had a sort of consideration amongst the debauched beings who infest these places in double capacities; these revolting porticoes of a sanctuary, where, braving all disgust, lust and misery caress each other by turns. For nearly half a century her establishment was the providence and last refuge of those daughters of Laïs, whom the consequences of their fall from virtue, and time, so swift in his outrages, have cast headlong under the same control as the stream and the bank: it is the old seraglio, where no one must penetrate who desires to rejoice his mind by delightful images: here is no enchantress! The Armida of the Chaussée d'Antin is but a hideous trull, who, alternating between a prison and a hospital, exhausts, in her own person, the vicissitudes of a career—whose last hope must be to die on a dunghill. In this asylum, the luxury of the Rue Vivienne is superseded by the trumpery of the Temple: and she who, during the ephemeral triumph of her attractions scarcely budded, disdained the first fruits of the fashion, finds still wherewithal to deck herself in that faded finery, which, falling lower and lower, has, at length, reached the wardrobe of mother Bariole. Thus we see a broken-down prad of the hackney drag assume, with