Page:The Enormous Room.pdf/127

116 a very fine education, living peacefully in Paris up to the time that she wrote to her relatives a letter containing the following treasonable sentiment:

"Je mennuie pour les neiges de Russie."

The letter had been read by the French censor, as had B.'s letter; and her arrest and transference from her home in Paris to La Ferté Macé promptly followed. She was as intelligent as she was virtuous and had nothing to do with her frailer sisters, so the Machine-Fixer informed us with a quickly passing flash of joy. Which sisters (his little forehead knotted itself and his big bushy eyebrows plunged together wrathfully) were wicked and indecent and utterly despicable disgraces to their sex—and this relentless Joseph fiercely and jerkily related how only the day before he had repulsed the painfully obvious solicitations of a Madame Potiphar by turning his back, like a good Christian, upon temptation and marching out of the room, broom tightly clutched in virtuous hand.

"M'sieu Jean" (meaning myself) "savez-vous"—with a terrific gesture which consisted in snapping his thumbnail between his teeth—"CA PUE!"

Then he added: "And what would my wife say to me if I came home to her and presented her with that which this creature had presented to me? They are animals," cried the little Machine-Fixer; "all they want is a man. They don't care who he is; they want a man. But they won't get me!" And he warned us to beware.

Especially interesting, not to say valuable, was the Machine-Fixer's testimony concerning the more or less regular "inspections" (which were held by the very same doctor who had "examined" me in the course of my first day at La Ferté) for les femmes; presumably in the interest of public safety. Les femmes, quoth the Machine-Fixer, who had been many times an eye-witness of this proceeding, lined up talking and laughing and—crime of crimes—smoking cigarettes, outside the bureau of M. le Médecin Major. "Une femme entre. Elle se lève les jupes jusqu'au menton et se met sur le banc.