I hadn't the vaguest notion what "Ti-bah! Ti-bah! Ti-bah!" meant, but that laughing face, with the red lips and the roguish eyes, seemed to me immensely fascinating. Among the faces of the other young ladies present—faces of dough, faces of tallow, faces all weariness, staleness, and banality, common, coarse, pointless, insipid faces—it shone like an epigram amongst platitudes, a thing of fire amongst things of dust. I turned to some one near me, and asked who she was.
"It's P'tit-Bleu, the dancing-girl. She's going to do a quadrille."
P 'tit-Bleu. . . . . It's the fashion, you know, in Paris, for the girls who "do quadrilles" to adopt unlikely nicknames: aren't the reigning favourites at this moment Chapeau-Mou and Fifi-la-Galette? P'tit-Bleu had derived hers from that vehement little "wine of the barrier," which, the song declares, "vous met la tête en feu." It was the tune of the same song, that, in another minute, I heard the band strike up, in the balcony over our heads. P'tit-Bleu came to a standstill in the middle of the floor, where she was joined by three minor dancing-girls, to make two couples. The chain of students closed in a circle round her. And the rest of us thronged behind them, pressing forward, and craning our necks. Then, as the band played, everybody sang, in noisy chorus:
Ça vous met la tête en feu!
Ça vous ra-ra-ra-ra-ra,
Ça vous ra-ra-ravigotte!"
P'tit-Bleu stood with her hands on her hips, her arms a-kimbo, her head thrown impudently back, her eyes sparkling mischievously, her lips curling in a perpetual play of smiles, while her three subalterns accomplished their tame preliminary measures; and thenP'tit-Bleu
