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By Root 1388 0

a waiting room, with gleaming woodwork and no sign of merchandise for sale. Light curtains on the door and window hid the inside of the shop from prying eyes, contributing to the impression that the boutique was actually the discreet and veiled antechamber to a strange temple of some sort. It was rare to see a customer enter Mme Sidonie’s shop. Usually, in fact, the knob was removed from the door. She always told people in the neighborhood that she went personally to the homes of wealthy clients to display her wares. Her only reason for renting the shop, she said, was the layout of the apartment, which communicated with the boutique below via a stairway hidden in the wall. Indeed, the lace merchant was seldom in. She came and went ten times a day, always with a hurried air. In any case, she did not limit herself to selling lace. She used her apartment to store goods picked up Lord knows where. There she sold rubber overshoes, raincoats, suspenders, and countless other items. Later she added to her inventory a new oil said to promote the growth of hair, various orthopedic devices, and an automatic coffeemaker, a patented invention, the commercialization of which gave her a great deal of trouble. When her brother came to see her, she was dealing in pianos, and her apartment was crammed with these instruments. There were pianos even in her bedroom, which was very smartly decorated in a manner that clashed with the commercial jumble of the other two rooms. She ran her two businesses in a perfectly methodical way. Customers who came for the merchandise upstairs entered and exited through the carriage entrance on the rue Papillon. You had to be in on the mystery of the hidden staircase to be aware of the lace merchant’s double life. Upstairs she went by the name of Mme Touche, using her husband’s surname, whereas the door that led to the shop directly from the street bore only her first name, so that most people knew her as Mme Sidonie.

Mme Sidonie was thirty-five years old, but she dressed so carelessly and had so little feminine appeal that one would have thought her much older. In truth she had no age. She always wore the same black dress, frayed at the pleats and rumpled and discolored from use, so that it resembled a lawyer’s robe threadbare from frequent rubbing against the courtroom rail. With a black hat pulled down to her forehead to hide her hair and a pair of heavy shoes, she walked the streets carrying a small basket whose handles were mended with string. This basket, which never left her side, was a whole world unto itself. If she opened it even slightly, all sorts of things spilled out: date books, folders, and above all bundles of paper bearing official stamps whose illegible writing she deciphered with remarkable dexterity. She had in her the makings of a business broker and a clerk of court. She lived among defaulted bills, writs, and court orders. Each time she sold ten francs’ worth of pomade or lace, she wormed her way into the good graces of her clients and became the business agent of her customers, running errands to lawyers and judges on their behalf. Week after week she hauled the dossiers in her basket around the city, putting herself to no end of trouble as she walked at a slow and steady pace from one end of Paris to the other, never taking a carriage. It would have been difficult to say what profit she derived from this work. She did it mainly because she had an instinctive taste for shady deals and a love of chicanery, but she also picked up a host of little benefits along the way: a dinner now and then or a franc added to her purse here and there. Her clearest gain, however, came in the form of the confidences she gleaned everywhere, which put her on the trail of likely scores and probable windfalls. Spending her life as she did, in other people’s homes and deeply involved in their affairs, she was a living catalog of supply and demand. She knew where there was a young girl in immediate need of a husband, a family in need of 3,000 francs, or an elderly gentleman willing to lend such a sum but only