Free The Woman With the Bouquet by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt Page B

the while.
    “The music is Chopin!”
    Humming in a reedy little voice, she jiggled on her ballet slippers, that must have been white once upon a time, her gestures hindered by the pink shawl sliding against her flowered dress, while her timid beret threatened to fall off. What was fascinating about her was the negligent way she performed her number: as if she wanted to have nothing to do with rhythm or tempo; she hummed the melody when she happened to think of it, provided she had enough breath left; as for her movements, she barely took more than a step at a time. She was like a little moppet of the age of four pretending to be a ballerina in front of a mirror. I got the impression that she knew this, and that she thought she was the only one who could do what she was doing. I could see a faint smile on her lips, reproaching us for being such ignorant connoisseurs. “I can perform anything, they don’t even notice, they don’t deserve any better.”
    “There! I’ve finished!”
    She saluted us with a slow, noble curtsy, gathering around her a vast imaginary skirt that ended in an invisible train.
    Those who regularly came across her gave a smattering of applause. Either out of pity, or cruelty, we began to give her an ovation, whistling, bawling, getting onlookers to join in the acclaim until the moment when, bathed in sweat, exhausted by the curtsies she had added to her choreography, she exclaimed shrilly, “Now don’t go getting ideas, there won’t be any encores!”
    She then walked along in front of us, her red beret outstretched.
    “For the dance, ladies and gentlemen. For the artiste, please. Thank you, in the name of art.”
    I often ran into her after that. One day she came close to the queue, teetering, her nose crimson, her gaze blurred: clearly she’d had too much to drink. She put down all her stuff and mumbled a few notes, wiggled her legs, just enough to realize she was incapable of finishing her haphazard ballet.
    It made her furious. She gave us a dark look, up and down.
    “Are you making fun of a poor old woman? But I wasn’t always like this, I used to be very beautiful, yes, very beautiful, over there in my bags I have photographs. And then, I was supposed to marry King Baudouin, the King of the Belgians, because the Belgians they don’t just have miserable little presidents like we do, they have real kings! Yessir, I was nearly the queen of the Belgians, you heard me! Queen of the Belgians, just because King Baudouin, when he was a young man, he was crazy about me. And I was crazy about him. Hear that? We were very happy. Very. And then there was that scheming woman, that . . . that . . .”
    She spat several times on the ground, disgusted, in a rage, trembling with hatred.
    “And then there was that Fabiola!”
    Victorious, she had managed to say her rival’s name. Pupils dilated with spite, eyebrows raised, she harangued us violently: “Fabiola, she stole him from me! Yes! Stole! When he was crazy about me. She didn’t care, that Spanish hussy, no respect, she wanted to marry him, she bewitched him. He turned away from me. Poof, just like that, in the blink of an eye.” She leaned against a wall, and tried to get her breath.
    “Fabiola! It’s not hard to speak several languages when you’re born with your ass in butter, and you’ve got maids from England, Germany, France, and America! Pshaw . . . I too could’ve spoken several languages if I hadn’t been born in the gutter. Thief! Thief! She stole my Baudouin!”
    At the end of her tether, the tramp took hold of herself, and looked at us as if she had suddenly discovered we were there. In a flash she made sure that her bags were still where she had left them, not far away, and then, limiting her performance to movements of her upper body, she hummed a vague tune, waved her arms and hands for twenty seconds, and then bowed abruptly.
    “There we are!”
    Then she began mumbling two speeches together between her teeth.
    “For