KATHERINE THE LACEMAKER
Girl of the Streets
by Marcel Schwob
Marcel Schwob / Katherine la dentellière
Marcel Schwob / Katherine la encajera
She was born about the middle of the fifteenth century, in the rue de la Parcheminerie near the rue Saint-Jacques, during a winter so cold that wolves ran over Paris on the snow. An old woman with a red nose under her hood took Katherine in and brought her up. At first she played in the doorways with Perrenette, Guillemette, Ysabeau and Jehanneton, who wore little petticoats and gathered icicles, chilling their small red fists in the icy gutters. They would watch the neighborhood boys whistle at passers-by from the tables of the SaintMerry tavern. Under open sheds they saw buckets of tripe, long fat sausages and big iron hooks from which the butchers hung quarters of meat near Saint-Benoit le Betourne, where the scriveners lived. They heard the scratching of quills in little shops, and in the evening saw clerks snuff out their flickering candles. At Petit-Pont they mocked the sidewalk orators, then scampered away to hide among the angles of the rue des Trois-Portes. After that they would sit together along the fountain’s curb and chatter until nightfall.
So Katherine passed her first youth, be¬ fore the old woman taught her to sit in front of a lacemaker’s cushion, patiently crossing the threads from the bobbins. Later on she wrorked at that trade. Jehanneton became a capemaker, Perrenette a washerwoman, while Ysabeau made gloves and Guillemette, happiest of all, was a sau¬ sage-maker, with her little face crimson and shining as if it had been rubbed in fresh pork blood. For the boys who played at the Saint-Merry new enterprises began. Some went to study on Mount Sainte Gene¬ vieve, some drove carts to Trou-Perrette, some clinked goblets of Aunis at the Pomme de Pin, others quarreled at the Hotel de la Grosse Margot. At noon they were seen in the tavern entrance on the me aux Feves; at midnight they left by the other door on the rue aux Juifs. As for Katherine, she continued to interwork the threads of her lace. On summer evenings she found it pleasant sitting on the church steps where they let her laugh and gossip.
Katherine wore an unbleached dress with a green jacket over it. Absorbed in the problems of clothes, she hated nothing so much as the padded garments worn by girls not of noble birth. She was fond of money —equally fond of the silver testons or ten sou pieces, the blancs, and above all of the golden ecus. That was how she made the acquaintance of Casin Cholet, sergeant of the yard at Chatelet, one evening in the shadow of his little office. Casin was poorly paid. Katherine often had supper with him at the Hotel de la Mule, opposite the Church des Mathurins, and after supping Casin would go out to steal chickens around the moats and ditches of Paris, bringing them back under the folds of his wide tabard, selling them very fairly to Machecroue, widow of Arnoul, who kept the poultry shop at the Petit-Chatelet gate.
Soon Katherine gave up her lacemaking, for the old woman with the red nose was now rotting her bones in the Cemetery des Innocents, and Casin Cholet had found his little friend a basement room near TroisPucelles, where he came to her late at night. He did not care if she showed herself at the window, her eyes blackened with charcoal, her cheeks smeared with white lead—he never forbade it; and all the pots, cups and dishes offered by Katherine to those who paid well, were stolen by Casin from various inns—from the Chaire, the Cynges or from the Hotel du Plat d’Etain. The day he pawned Katherine’s belted dress at the Trois-Lavandieres Casin Cholet disappeared. His friends told her he had been caught snooping in the bottom of a cart, that he had been soundly beaten and driven out of Paris by the Baudoyer gate at the order of the provost. She never saw him again. Having no heart to earn her living alone, she became a girl of the streets, dwelling wherever she could.
At first she waited by the tavern doors, and those who knew her took her behind walls, under the Chatelet or around by the College of Navarre. When it grew too cold for this, a complaisant old woman let her come into a bath-house where the madame gave her shelter. She lived there in a stone room strewn with green rushes, and they let her keep her name, Katherine the Lacemaker, though she made no more lace. Sometimes they gave her liberty to walk through the streets if she promised to return by the hour the men were accustomed to arrive, then Katherine would go peering into the glove shops and the lace shops, but most of all she envied the red face of the little sausagemaker, laughing among her chunks candles that melted and dripped thickly behind black panes.
Finally Katherine grew tired of living shut up in a square room. She ran away to the roads. From that time on she was no longer Parisienne or lacemaker, but one of those women who haunt the outskirts of French towns, waiting by cemetery walls for any man who passes. These women know no names but those which suit their faces, and they ' called Katherine “The Snout.” She tramped the fields, where her white face was often seen peeping between the mulberry trees or over the hedges. Evenings, she sat by the roadside, and she learned to control her fear of the dark in the midst of the dead, while her feet shivered against the stone-marked graves. No more white money, no more silver testons, no golden ecus; Katherine lived thinly now on bread, cheese and a jug of water. She had vagabond friends who cried, “Snout! Snout!” at her from afar—and she loved them.
The chapel bells were her greatest loss, d for The Snout would remember June nights when she had spread her green jacket out on the church steps. Those were the days when she had so envied young ladies in their gay dresses. But now there remained to her neither cape nor jacket. Bareheaded, she crouched on the stones waiting for her bread. In the thick shadows of the cemeteries she regretted those red candles at the house with the square room, and the green rushes underfoot, instead of black mud sticking to her boots.
One night a tramp came along dressed up like a soldier. He cut The Snout’s throat to get her purse, but he found no money in it.
No comments:
Post a Comment