My next friend of the working class, and she, I am proud to say, is a friend of several years’ standing, is my Parisian washerwoman. But here, I am bound to confess, I am fronted with an exceptional character,—witty, brilliant, of a liberal and bountiful nature, and original almost to the point of genius. My washerwoman comes every Tuesday, and brings gaiety and delightful wit along with her. She is all sorts of odd things together: a fierce Nationalist, a hard politician, a violent atheist, a hater of Jesuits and freemasons, inclined to Protestantism, if, unfortunately, the English were not Protestants already; intelligent enough not to have been dazzled by the Russian alliance, even when all France went mad on the Czar’s visit. “He wants our money, mademoiselle,” she said to me in those mad times, “and we are fools enough to believe in his friendship.” Whenever you mention the Russian alliance to her, she promptly asks who has seen that alliance written out on paper, stamped, and signed. And at the time of the Dreyfus Affair she could tell me to a centime the sum the Jews and the English had paid the Czar, the Pope, and the Emperor of Germany. I was used to an excellent, witty, and extravagant lecture on the intricacies of the Affair every Tuesday which delighted me, as she always had some ineffable monstrosity on the part of the Jews, the English, the Germans, or the crowned heads of Europe to impart; and took my joking with such delicious good humour that I did not know how to fill up the gap after the verdict of Rennes, for she is a very seemly, dignified little woman, my Parisian washerwoman. She stands upon her manners, and says nothing more than “Good morning, mademoiselle,” if you give her eloquence no opening. And what an eloquence it is! What a flow of admirably chosen words, so expressively enunciated, with fitting gesticulations and the most wonderful grimaces of the wittiest and ugliest face I have ever seen! Then came the Transvaal War, and here she shone. Indeed, I have repeatedly begged her to abandon the obscure calling of a washerwoman, and betake herself to public speaking. I have never known a woman more astonishingly fitted for the part.