hangings, lately arrived from Paris, gave it an air of fresh elegance and comfort. One breathed there the perfume of the most fashionable essences bought at the scent shops on the boulevard.
It was there that Jean passed his hours of intoxication. This room seemed to him an enchanted palace, surpassing in luxury and charm all that his imagination could have pictured.
This woman had filled his life and had become his only happiness. With the refinement of a creature sated with pleasure, she had desired to possess Jean’s soul as well as body. With the feline guile of a creole she had acted for the benefit of this lover, who was younger than herself, an irresistible comedy of ingenuous love. She had succeeded; he belonged to her, body and soul.
XI
A very comical little negress, of whom Jean took no notice, lived in Cora’s house as a “captive.” This little girl was called Fatou-gaye.
She had been brought quite recently to St. Louis and sold as a slave by Douaïch Moors, who had captured her in one of their raids upon the territory of the Khassonkés.
Her extreme mischievousness and her fierce independence had caused her to be relegated to a very humble position in the household. She was looked upon as a little nuisance, a useless mouth, and an acquisition to be regretted.
Having not yet quite arrived at marriageable age, when the negresses of St. Louis deem it proper to clothe themselves, she generally went naked, with a necklet of grigris round her throat, and a few glass beads strung round her loins. Her head was very carefully shaven, except for five tiny locks of hair, knotted and stiffened with gum, five little rigid tails, arranged at regular intervals from the forehead to the nape of the neck. Each of these locks had a coral bead at the tip, except the middle one, which displayed a more precious ornament. This was a gold sequin of great antiquity, which must have been brought in old days from Algiers by caravan, after long and complicated wanderings through the Sahara.
Without this grotesque arrangement of hair, the regularity of Fatou-gaye’s features would have been striking. She was of the purest Khassonké type: a small delicate Grecian face, with a skin smooth and black as polished onyx; teeth of dazzlingly whiteness; eyes of extraordinary mobility, two large, jet black, restless orbs rolling left and right, with whites of a bluish tint, and black eyelids.
When Jean was leaving his mistress, he often used to meet this little creature.
As soon as she saw him she tucked a piece of blue cotton cloth around her waist—this was her festal garment—and came towards him smiling. With soft, caressing inflections in her small, shrill, piping negress’s voice, with hanging head and the mincing airs of an enamoured ouistiti, she would say,
May man coper, souma toubab. (Translated: Give me a copper, give me a sou, my white man.)
That was the refrain of all the little girls in St. Louis. Jean was used to it. When he was in a good temper and had a sou in his pocket, he would give it to Fatou-gaye.
But that was not the most curious feature of the incident. What was out of the ordinary was Fatou-gaye’s behaviour. Instead of buying herself a piece of sugar, as other girls might have done, she would go and hide herself in a corner and set to work to sew very carefully into the sachets of her amulets the sous that she received from the spahi.
XII
One night in February a suspicion crossed Jean’s mind.
Cora had asked him to leave at midnight, and just as he was going away, he thought he heard a sound of pacing in an adjoining room, as if someone were waiting there.
He left at midnight, and then he returned with stealthy tread, stepping noiselessly over the sand. He climbed over a wall and on to a balcony, and looked into Cora’s room through the half-opened door leading on to the terrace.
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