Page:Memoirs of Vidocq, Volume 3.djvu/119

suit light purses, a landlady keeps liquors and lasses, both tending to the same end and serving for the same purposes. Here the liquors are like the secret entrance of the lottery-office, a means of deceiving the spy: the shamefaced lover enters, under the pretext of taking a glass of wine, and is doubly poisoned. It is to this sort of blind coffee-shop that the refuse of prostitutes crowd, and heap their favours on the beastly drunkard, or make terms with the poverty of their customer. More than one ci-devant beauty, now reduced to her calico petticoat, her coarse apron, and wooden shoes,—unless she prefer philosophes, (shoes of fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five pence,) here boasts of the tradition, almost forgotten, though recent, of those charms which procured for her the cachemere and splendid veil which she displayed in the cavalcades of Montmorency, or else in the elegant tilbury which convened her to Bagatelle. I have seen many of these vicissitudes, and to give one of the million examples, there was a friend of Emilie, named Caroline, who had been the mistress of a Russian prince. In her days of splendour, a hundred thousand crowns a year did not pay the expenses of her establishment; she had equipages, horses, lackeys, courtiers; she had been very handsome, but her beauty had entirely faded. She was Emilie's companion, and even more degraded than her. Constantly muddled by liquor, she never had a lucid interval. The lady of the house, who provided her attire, for Caroline had no longer a rag of her own, watched her as closely as a cat does a mouse, lest she should sell her clothes. A hundred times she had been found at some low hole of vice naked as a worm; she had drank away every article of dress, even to her chemise. Such is the sad condition of these wretched creatures, almost all of whom have had, at one time of their lives, a run of good luck: after having the means of literally rolling in money, they feel the want of a crust to stop the cravings of hunger, and those palates, on which the delicacies of Tortoni palled, find a relish in the pota-