Soup made from potherbs and the water from boiled beans, a piece of veal with potatoes, swamped in brownish water by way of gravy, a dish of beans, and cherries of inferior quality, all served and eaten from chipped plates and dishes, with forks and spoons of nickel’s mean unringing metal – was that a menu worthy of such a pretty woman? The Baron would have wept to see it. The dull carafes did nothing to improve the harsh colour of wine bought by the litre from the wine-merchant on the corner. The table-napkins had been in use for a week. Everything, in sum, betrayed a graceless poverty, an indifferent lack of care for the family on the part of both husband and wife. The most unnoticing observer, seeing them, would have said to himself that the dismal moment had come, for these two creatures, when the necessity of eating makes people look about them for some piece of luck which, by fair means or foul, may be induced to come their way.

Valérie’s first words to her husband, indeed, will explain the delay in serving dinner, which had been kept back for her, probably by a self-interested devotion on the part of the cook.

‘Samanon will only take your bills of exchange at fifty per cent, and wants part of your salary assigned to him as security.’

Financial distress, which could still be concealed in the household of the Departmental Chief in the Ministry of War, who was cushioned against it by a salary of twenty-four thousand francs plus bonuses, had plainly reached its last stage in the case of the clerk.

‘You have made my chief,’ said the husband, looking at his wife.

‘I believe I have,’ she replied, without blinking at the expression, borrowed from stage-door slang.

‘What are we to do?’ Marneffe went on. ‘The landlord is all set to seize our things tomorrow. And your father must needs go and die without making a will! Upon my word, those Empire fellows all believe that they’re immortal like their Emperor.’

‘Poor Father,’ she said. ‘I was the only child he had, and he was very fond of me! The Countess must have burned the will. How could he possibly have forgotten me, when he always used to give us two or three thousand-franc notes at a time?’

‘We owe four quarters’ rent, fifteen hundred francs! Is our furniture worth that? “That is the question”, as Shakespeare says.’

‘Well, good-bye, my pet,’ said Valérie, who had taken only a couple of mouthfuls of the veal, from which the maid had extracted the juices for a gallant soldier back from Algiers. ‘Desperate situations require desperate remedies!’

‘Valérie, where are you going?’ cried Marneffe, moving to stand between his wife and the door.

‘I’m going to see our landlord,’ she answered, as she arranged her ringlets under her charming hat. ‘And you had better try to get on the right side of that old maid, if she really is the Director’s cousin.’

The ignorance of one another’s social position in which tenants of the same house live is something constantly noted, and shows clearly how people are borne along in the swift current of existence in Paris. It is easy to understand, however, that a civil servant who leaves early every morning for his office, returns home for dinner, and goes out every evening, and a wife addicted to the gaieties of Paris, may know nothing of how an old maid lives on the third floor across the court in their block, especially when the old maid has Mademoiselle Fischer’s habits.

The first person to stir in the house, Lisbeth would go to bring in her milk, bread, and charcoal without exchanging a word with anyone, and she went to bed with the sun. She never received either letters or visitors, and was not on neighbourly terms with her fellow tenants. Hers was one of those anonymous insect-like existences to be found in certain houses, in which one may discover at the end of four years that there is an old gentleman living on the fourth floor who once knew Voltaire, Pilâtre de Rozier, Beaujon, Marcel, Molé, Sophie Arnould, Franklin, and Robespierre. What Monsieur and Madame Marneffe had just said about Lisbeth Fischer they had come to know because the quarter was so isolated and because of the friendly relations with the porters which their financial embarrassment had obliged them to establish, for they were too dependent on the porters’ good-will not to have carefully cultivated it. It so happened that the old maid’s pride, closed lips, and reserve had provoked in the porters that exaggerated show of respect and cold attitude which spring from an unacknowledged discontent and a sense of being treated as inferior. The porters, moreover, in the case in question, as they say in the law courts, considered themselves just as good as a tenant paying a rent of two hundred and fifty francs. Since Cousin Bette’s confidences to her second cousin Hortense were in fact true, one can understand how the portress, gossiping with the Marneffes, might have slandered Mademoiselle Fischer in the belief that she was simply passing on a scandalous piece of news.

When the spinster had taken her candlestick from the hands of the portress, the respectable Madame Olivier, she moved forward to see whether there was a light in the attic windows above her apartment. At that hour, even in July, it was so dark at the end of the court that the old maid could not go to bed without a light.

‘Oh, you needn’t worry; Monsieur Steinbock is in. He hasn’t even been out,’ Madame Olivier said to Mademoiselle Fischer, maliciously.

The spinster made no reply. She had remained a peasant in this respect, that she cared little for what people not close to her might say. Peasants are aware of nothing outside their own village, and to her the opinion of the little circle in the midst of which she lived was still the only one that mattered. She climbed the stairs, then, purposefully, to the attic instead of her own apartment. At dessert, she had put some fruit and sweetmeats into her bag for her sweetheart, and she was going up to present them, for all the world like an old maid bringing home a titbit for her dog.

She found the hero of Hortense’s dreams working by the light of a little lamp, whose rays were concentrated by passing through a globe filled with water – a pale, fair young man, sitting at a kind of work-bench littered with sculptor’s tools, red wax, chisels, roughed out bases, bronze copies of models, wearing a workman’s blouse, with a little group in modelling wax in his hand, which he was scrutinizing with the concentration of a poet at work.

‘Here, Wenceslas, look what I’ve brought you,’ she said, spreading her handkerchief on a corner of the bench. Then she carefully took the sweets and fruit from her reticule.

‘You are very kind, Mademoiselle,’ the poor exile replied, in a melancholy voice.

‘These will refresh you, my poor child. You heat your blood working like this. You weren’t born for such hard work.’

Wenceslas Steinbock looked at the old maid in some surprise.

‘Well, eat them,’ she said then, roughly, ‘and don’t gaze at me as if I were one of your figures that you’re feeling pleased with.’

This verbal cuff on the ear put an end to the young man’s astonishment; for he recognized the voice of the female mentor to whose bullying he was so inured that tenderness from her always took him by surprise. Although Steinbock was twenty-nine, he appeared, as fair men sometimes do, to be five or six years younger; and anyone seeing his youthful face – although its bloom had vanished in the fatigues and hardships of exile – side by side with Mademoiselle Fischer’s lean, hard countenance, might have thought that Nature had made a mistake in assigning their sexes. He got up and flung himself into an old Louis XV easy chair upholstered in yellow Utrecht velvet, apparently ready to take a breather. The old maid then selected a greengage and gently offered it to her friend.

‘Thank you,’ he said, taking the fruit.

‘Are you tired?’ she asked, giving him another.

‘I am not tired with work, but tired of life,’ he replied.

‘What nonsense you talk!’ she said, somewhat tartly.