Trilby

'

Mimi Pinson est une blonde,'
    Une blonde que l'on connait;
    Elle n'a qu'une robe au monde.
    Launderirette! et qu'un bonnet!'

'

Mimi Pinson est une blonde,'
    Une blonde que l'on connait;
    Elle n'a qu'une robe au monde.
    Launderirette! et qu'un bonnet!'

"A street there is in Paris famous
For which no rhyme our language yields;
Roo Nerve day Petty Shong its name is—
The New Street of the Little Fields… "

    'Dieu! qu'il fait bon la regarder.
    La gracieuse, bonne et belle!
    Pour les grands biens qui sont en elle
    Chacun est pret de la louer.'

    Par dela, ne dela la mer
    Ne s'jay dame ni damoiselle
    Qui soil en tous biens parfaits telle—
    C'est un songe que d'y penser:
    Dieu! qu'il fait bon la regarder!'

    'Felicite passee
    Qui ne peux revenir.
    Tourment de ma pensee.
    Que n'ay-je, en te perdant, perdu le souvenir!'

He had never heard such music as this, never dreamed such music was possible. He was conscious, while it lasted, that he saw deeper into the beauty, the sadness of things, the very heart of them, and their pathetic evanescence, as with a new inner eye - even into eternity itself, beyond the veil - a vague cosmic vision that faded when the music was over, but left an unfading reminiscence of its having been, and a passionate desire to express the like some day through the plastic medium of his own beautiful art.
(Page 25)

Whether it be an aggravation of her misdeeds or and extenuating circumstance, no pressure of want, no temptations of greed or vanity, had ever been factors in urging Trilby on her downward career after her first false step in that direction—the result of ignorance, bad advice (from her mother, of all people in the world), and base betrayal. She might have lived in guilty splendor has she chosen, but her wants were few. She had no vanity, and her tastes were of the simplest, and she earned enough to gratify them all, and to spare…So she followed love for love’s sake only, now and then, as she would have followed art if she had been a man—capriciously, desultorily, more in a frolicsome spirit of camaraderie than anything else. Like an amateur, in short—a distinguished amateur who is too proud to sell his pictures, but willingly gives one away now and then to some highly valued and much admiring friend.

Little Billee was small and slender, about twenty or twenty-one, and had a straight white forehead veined with blue, large dark-blue eyes, delicate regular features, and coal-black hair. He was also very graceful and well built, with very small hands and feet…And in his winning and handsome face there was just a faint suggestion of some possible very remote Jewish ancestor—just a tinge of that strong, sturdy, irrepressible, indomitable, indelible blood which is such priceless value in diluted homeopathic doses, like dry white Spanish wine called montijo, which is not meant to be taken pure; but without a judicious admixture of which no sherry can go round the world and keep its flavor intact…Fortunately for the world, and especially for ourselves, most of us have in our veins at least a minim of that precious fluid, whether we know it or show it or not. Tant pis pour les autres! [Too bad for the others!]

But Little Billee’s upper middle class family approved not of his choice of artist’s model living hand-to-mouth, and so she fell under the spell of Svengali:

He had bold, brilliant black eyes, with long heavy lids, a thin, sallow face, and a beard of burnt-up black which grew almost from under his eyelids; and over it his mustache, a shade lighter, fell in two long spiral twists.

“Then a moment of silence and breathless suspense—curiosity on tiptoe!”(p. 316)

But I shan’t tell you the end, as it is for you to read for yourselves. But there is a lovely section towards the end in which Trilby gives her rendition of what praying is:

”Pray to Him? Well, not—not often—not in words and on my knees and with my hands together, you know! Thinking’s praying, very often—don’t you think so? And so’s being sorry and ashamed when one’s done a mean thing, and glad when one’s resisted a temptation, and grateful when it’s a fine day and one’s enjoying one’s self without hurting any one else! What is it but praying when you try and bear up after losing all you cared to live for? And very good praying too! There can be prayers without words just as well as songs I suppose; and Svengali used to say that songs without words are the best!”

Oxford World Classics republished this novel in 1999, and Penguin Classics has a reprint published in 1995. It has been in circulation for nearly 120 years because it is a classic, and it is one you might want to have a look at one day, to see what inspired all the follow-on art: the music and plays and fashion and film and other stories.