I
They both styled themselves "Madame," but only the younger of the old
ladies had been married. Madame Valiere was still a _demoiselle_, but
as she drew towards sixty it had seemed more _convenable_ to possess
a mature label. Certainly Madame Depine had no visible matrimonial
advantages over her fellow-lodger at the Hotel des Tourterelles,
though in the symmetrical cemetery of Montparnasse (Section 22)
wreaths of glass beads testified to a copious domesticity in the far
past, and a newspaper picture of a _chasseur d'Afrique_ pinned over
her bed recalled--though only the uniform was the dead soldier's--the
son she had contributed to France's colonial empire. Practically it
was two old maids--or two lone widows--whose boots turned pointed toes
towards each other in the dark cranny of the rambling, fusty corridor
of the sky-floor. Madame Depine was round, and grew dumpier with age;
"Madame" Valiere was long, and grew slimmer. Otherwise their lives ran
parallel. For the true madame of the establishment you had to turn to
Madame la Proprietaire, with her buxom bookkeeper of a daughter and
her tame baggage-bearing husband. This full-blooded, jovial creature,
with her swart moustache, represented the only Parisian success of
three provincial lives, and, in her good-nature, had permitted her
decayed townswomen--at as low a rent as was compatible with
prudence--to shelter themselves under her roof and as near it as
possible. Her house being a profitable warren of American
art-students, tempered by native journalists and decadent poets, she
could, moreover, afford to let the old ladies off coffee and candles.
They were at liberty to prepare their own _dejeuner_ in winter or to
buy it outside in summer; they could burn their own candles or sit in
the dark, as the heart in them pleased; and thus they were as cheaply
niched as any one in the gay city. _Rentieres_ after their meticulous
fashion, they drew a ridiculous but regular amount from the mysterious
coffers of the Credit Lyonnais.
But though they met continuously in the musty corridor, and even
dined--when they did dine--at the same _cremerie_, they never spoke to
each other. Madame la Proprietaire was the channel through which they
sucked each other's history, for though they had both known her in
their girlish days at Tonnerre, in the department of Yonne, they had
not known each other. Madame Valiere (Madame Depine learnt, and it
seemed to explain the frigidity of her neighbour's manner) still
trailed clouds of glory from the service of a Princess a quarter of a
century before. Her refusal to wink at the Princess's goings-on, her
austere, if provincial, regard for the convenances, had cost her
the place, and from these purpureal heights she had fallen lower and
lower, till she struck the attic of the Hotel des Tourterelles.
But even a haloed past does not give one a licence to annoy one's
neighbours. Madame Depine felt resentfully, and she hated Madame
Valiere as a haughty minion of royalty, who kept a cough, which barked
loudest in the silence of the night.
"Why doesn't she go to the hospital, your Princess?" she complained to
Madame la Proprietaire.
"Since she is able to nurse herself at home," the opulent-bosomed
hostess replied with a shrug.
"At the expense of other people," Madame Depine retorted bitterly. "I
shall die of her cough, I am sure of it."
Madame showed her white teeth sweetly. "Then it is you who should go
to the hospital."