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By Root 663 0

the poorest ragpicker’s family in all Paris. Both her father and mother lived by picking garbage cans and selling the bits of tin, leather and paper they found. Madeleine was placed in the sumptuous bedroom furniture department, under the supervision of a suave, waxed, starched floorwalker. She had never slept on a bed, only on a pile of rags and newspapers in a shack. When people were not looking she felt the satin bedspreads, the mattresses, the feather pillows, as if they were ermine or chinchilla. She had a natural Parisian gift for appearing charmingly dressed on the money other women spent on stockings alone. She was attractive, with humorous eyes, curly black hair and well-rounded curves. She developed two passions, one to steal a few drops of perfume or cologne from the perfume department, another to wait until the store was closing so she could lie down on one of the softest beds and pretend she was to sleep there. She preferred the canopied ones. She felt more secure lying under the curtains. The floorwalker was usually in such a hurry to leave that she was left alone for a few minutes to indulge in this fantasy. She thought that while lying in such a bed her feminine charms were a million times enhanced, and she wished certain elegant men she had seen on the Champs Elysées could see her there and realize how well she would look in a beautiful bedroom.

‘Her fantasy became more complex. She arranged to have a mirrored dressing table placed in front of the bed so she could admire herself lying down. Then one day when she had accomplished every step of the ceremony, she saw that the floorwalker had been watching her with amazement. As she was about to leap off the bed he stopped her.

‘“Madame,” he said (she had always been called Mademoiselle), “I am delighted to make your acquaintance. I hope you are pleased with the bed I made for you, according to your orders. Do you find it soft enough? Do you think Monsieur le Comte will like it?”

‘“Monsieur le Comte is fortunately away for a week, and I will be able to enjoy my bed with someone else,” she answered. Then she sat up and offered her hand to the man. “Now kiss it as you would kiss a lady’s hand in a salon.” Smiling, he did this with suave elegance. Then they heard a sound and they both vanished in different directions.

‘Every day they stole five or ten minutes from the closing-hour rush. Pretending to put things in order, to dust, to rectify errors on the price tags, they planned the little scene. He added the most effective touch of all – a screen. Then lace-edged sheets from another department. Then he made up the bed and turned down the coverlet. After kissing her hands, they conversed. He called her Nana. As she did not know the book, he gave it to her. What concerned him now was the incongruous effect of her tight little black dress on the pastel bedspread. He would borrow a filmy negligée worn by a mannequin during the day and cover Madeleine with it. Even if salesmen or saleswomen passed by, they did not see the scene behind the screen.

‘When Madeleine had enjoyed the hand-kissing, he deposited a kiss further up along her arm, in the nook within the elbow. There the skin was sensitive, and when she folded her arm, it seemed as if the kiss were enclosed and nurtured. Madeleine let it lie there like a preserved flower and then later, when she was alone, she opened her arm and kissed the same place as if to devour it more intimately. This kiss, deposited with such delicacy, was more potent than all the gross pinchings she had received in the street as tributes to her charms or the whispered obscenities of the workmen: Viens que je te suce.

‘At first he sat at the foot of the bed, then he stretched himself alongside her to smoke a cigarette with all the ceremony of an opium dreamer. Alarming footsteps on the other side of the screen gave to their meeting the secrecy and dangers of a lovers’ rendezvous. Then Madeleine would say, “I wish we could escape from the jealous surveillance of the Count. He is getting on my nerves.” But her admirer was too wise to