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I hardly fancy it would be possible to find in the whole of Paris, a more lively and peculiar house than that of the sculptor Simaise. Life there is one continual round of festivities. At whatever hour you drop in upon them, a sound of singing and laughter, or the jingle of a piano, guitar, or tamtam greets you. You can never enter the studio without finding a waltz going on, or a set of quadrilles, or a game of battledore and shuttlecock, or else it is cumbered with all the litter and preparations for a ball; shreds of tulle and ribbons lying scattered among the sculptor’s chisels; artificial flowers hanging over the busts, and spangled skirts spreading over groups of moist clay.

The fact is that four big t daughters of sixteen to twenty-five years of age, all very pretty indeed, take up a great deal of room; and when these young ladies whirl round with their hair streaming down their backs, with floating ribbons, long pins, and showy ornaments, it really seems as if instead of four there were eight, sixteen, thirty-two Misses Simaise, as dashing the one as the other, talking and laughing loudly, with the hoydenish manner peculiar to artists’ daughters, with the studio jests, the familiarity of students, and knowing also better than anyone how to dismiss a creditor or blow up a tradesman impertinent enough to present his bill at an inopportune moment.

These young damsels are the real mistresses of the house. From early dawn the father works, chisels, models unceasingly, for he has no settled income. At first he was ambitious and strove to do good work; some early successful exhibitions promised him future fame; but the necessity of providing for the support of his family, the clothing, feeding and future establishment of his children, threw him back into the ordinary work of the trade. As for Madame Simaise, she never attended to anything.

Very handsome when she married, very much admired in the artistic world into which her husband introduced her, at first satisfied with being only a pretty woman, later on she resigned herself to the part of a woman who had been pretty. A creole by birth, at least such was her pretension–although it was asserted that her parents had never left Courbevoie,–she spent the days from morning to night in a hammock swung up in turn in all the different rooms of the house, fanning herself and taking siestas, full of contempt for the material details of everyday life. She had so often sat to her husband as model for Hebes and Dianas, that she fancied her only duty was to pass through life carrying some emblem of a goddess, such as a crescent on her head or a goblet in her hand. Indeed the disorder of the establishment was a sight in itself. The least thing necessitated a full hour’s search.

“Have you seen my thimble? Marthe, Eva, Genevieve, Madeleine, who has seen my thimble?”

The drawers, in which books, powder, rouge, spangles, spoons and fans are tossed at haphazard, though crammed full, contain absolutely nothing useful; moreover they belong to strange pieces of furniture, curious, battered and incomplete. And how peculiar is the house itself! As they are constantly changing their residence, they never have time to settle anywhere, and this merry household seems to be perpetually awaiting the setting to rights indispensable after a ball. Only so many things are lacking, that it is not worth while settling, and as long as they can put on a bit of finery, display themselves out of doors with something of a meteor flash, a semblance of style and appearance of luxury, honour is saved! Encampment does not in any way distress this migratory tribe. Through the half-opened doors, their poverty is betrayed by the four bare walls of an unfurnished chamber, or the litter of an overcrowded room. It is bohemianism in the domestic circle, a life full of improvidence and surprises.