At twenty years of age, Mademoiselle Musette was a very pretty young woman, and not long after her arrival in Paris she had become what so many pretty young women become if they have a nice figure, if they know how to flirt easily and if they have a little ambition but not much education. For some time, she captivated the Latin Quarter at dinners where, in a voice that was always very fresh though not always in tune, she sang the many folk songs she knew and for this her name has since been celebrated by those fine artisans who create the jewels known as poetry. But then Mademoiselle Musette suddenly and without warning abandoned the Rue de la Harpe to take her place on the cytherean heights of the Quartier Bréda.

She soon rose to a place of prominence in the aristocracy of pleasure, slowly but surely ascending to such a pinnacle of celebrity that her name appeared in Paris newspapers and lithograph portraits of her were available from picture dealers.

Yet Mademoiselle Musette was an exception among the women in whose midst she lived. Like all women who are truly feminine, she was by nature elegant and poetic, with a love of luxury and the pleasures it afforded. Her coquetry arose from a powerful attraction to all things of beauty and distinction; a daughter of the common people, she wouldn't have been at all out of place amid the most regal splendor. But Mademoiselle Musette, who was young and attractive, would never willingly agree to become the mistress of a man who was not, like her, young and attractive. She was once known to gallantly refuse magnificent offers from an old man so rich that he was called the Peru of Chaussée-d’Antin, a man who would have placed at her feet a golden stairway leading to the fulfillment of her fantasies. Intelligent and spiritual, she couldn't stand fools and idiots no matter how old they were, no matter what their names and titles were.