Roger Firmin

Hello. My name is Roger Firmin. You must be the reader. How do you do?

I am now going to write a little about some of my French women; the other will be for another day. The reader may, to begin with, have been surprised at my feelings towards them. I shall start with Yvonne, a young person about twenty-one or twenty-two who has made much progress since the evening I first met her. It was in 1996, at the Nouvelle-Athènes. I was sitting in that café, having failed to find poor Perruche, of whom I will tell later, at the meeting-place we had arranged. Yvonne was sitting quite close to me, alone, her face that of a young girl, her manner somewhat artificial and her dress ugly. In any case, she reminded me a little of that poem of Verlaine's: Dansons la gigue! I was so annoyed at having missed Perruche, who was no doubt intimately engaged somewhere with one of her 'adored', and I was so bored moreover in that horrible café, that I signed to my neighbour to join me. In fact, had she not responded I would not have insisted. But, as if it were fated, she came over, and I then had to chat to her as one does chat on these occasions, saying nothing at all. How ingenuous she was and how clearly one saw from all the naïve, silly and right-thinking things she said that she was only a beginner. Indeed, when I left her half an hour later, I regretted already having given my address that she might come to see me the next day. The following day, it was even worse. As I had invited her for the purpose, she got into bed as soon as she arrived, behaving exactly as if she were at home, too much as if she were at home. While I had dreamed of instructing her, of having a young woman to bring up in the way she should go. Nevertheless, I sat by the bed and tried, by giving her advice and endeavouring to educate her a little, to put her on the right path, etc. But it was a dead loss. With her legs in the air against the wall, Yvonne could talk only of her self-pity, of her desire to become an honest girl again, to return to her family and other shocking things.