I was not rich—on the contrary; and I had been told the Pension Beaurepas
was cheap. I had, moreover, been told that a boarding-house is a capital
place for the study of human nature. I had a fancy for a literary
career, and a friend of mine had said to me, “If you mean to write you
ought to go and live in a boarding-house; there is no other such place to
pick up material.” I had read something of this kind in a letter
addressed by Stendhal to his sister: “I have a passionate desire to know
human nature, and have a great mind to live in a boarding-house, where
people cannot conceal their real characters.” I was an admirer of _La
Chartreuse de Parme_, and it appeared to me that one could not do better
than follow in the footsteps of its author. I remembered, too, the
magnificent boarding-house in Balzac’s Père Goriot,—the “_pension
bourgeoise des deux sexes et autres_,” kept by Madame Vauquer, _née_ De
Conflans. Magnificent, I mean, as a piece of portraiture; the
establishment, as an establishment, was certainly sordid enough, and I
hoped for better things from the Pension Beaurepas. This institution was
one of the most esteemed in Geneva, and, standing in a little garden of
its own, not far from the lake, had a very homely, comfortable, sociable
aspect. The regular entrance was, as one might say, at the back, which
looked upon the street, or rather upon a little _place_, adorned like
every place in Geneva, great or small, with a fountain. This fact was
not prepossessing, for on crossing the threshold you found yourself more
or less in the kitchen, encompassed with culinary odours. This, however,
was no great matter, for at the Pension Beaurepas there was no attempt at
gentility or at concealment of the domestic machinery. The latter was of
a very simple sort. Madame Beaurepas was an excellent little old
woman—she was very far advanced in life, and had been keeping a pension
for forty years—whose only faults were that she was slightly deaf, that
she was fond of a surreptitious pinch of snuff, and that, at the age of
seventy-three, she wore flowers in her cap. There was a tradition in the
house that she was not so deaf as she pretended; that she feigned this
infirmity in order to possess herself of the secrets of her lodgers. But
I never subscribed to this theory; I am convinced that Madame Beaurepas
had outlived the period of indiscreet curiosity. She was a philosopher,
on a matter-of-fact basis; she had been having lodgers for forty years,
and all that she asked of them was that they should pay their bills, make
use of the door-mat, and fold their napkins. She cared very little for
their secrets. “J’en ai vus de toutes les couleurs,” she said to me.
She had quite ceased to care for individuals; she cared only for types,
for categories. Her large observation had made her acquainted with a
great number, and her mind was a complete collection of “heads.” She
flattered herself that she knew at a glance where to pigeon-hole a
new-comer, and if she made any mistakes her deportment never betrayed
them. I think that, as regards individuals, she had neither likes nor
dislikes; but she was capable of expressing esteem or contempt for a
species. She had her own ways, I suppose, of manifesting her approval,
but her manner of indicating the reverse was simple and unvarying. “Je
trouve que c’est déplacé”—this exhausted her view of the matter. If one
of her inmates had put arsenic into the _pot-au-feu_, I believe Madame
Beaurepas would have contented herself with remarking that the proceeding
was out of place. The line of misconduct to which she most objected was
an undue assumption of gentility; she had no patience with boarders who
gave themselves airs. “When people come _chez moi_, it is not to cut a
figure in the world; I have never had that illusion,” I remember hearing
her say; “and when you pay seven francs a day, _tout compris_, it
comprises everything but the right to look down upon the others. But
there are people who, the less they pay, the more they take themselves
_au sérieux_. My most difficult boarders have always been those who have
had the little rooms.”
Madame Beaurepas had a niece, a young woman of some forty odd years; and
the two ladies, with the assistance of a couple of thick-waisted,
red-armed peasant women, kept the house going. If on your exits and
entrances you peeped into the kitchen, it made very little difference;
for Célestine, the cook, had no pretension to be an invisible functionary
or to deal in occult methods. She was always at your service, with a
grateful grin she blacked your boots; she trudged off to fetch a cab; she
would have carried your baggage, if you had allowed her, on her broad
little back. She was always tramping in and out, between her kitchen and
the fountain in the place, where it often seemed to me that a large part
of the preparation for our dinner went forward—the wringing out of towels
and table-cloths, the washing of potatoes and cabbages, the scouring of
saucepans and cleansing of water-bottles. You enjoyed, from the
doorstep, a perpetual back-view of Célestine and of her large, loose,
woollen ankles, as she craned, from the waist, over into the fountain and
dabbled in her various utensils. This sounds as if life went on in a
very make-shift fashion at the Pension Beaurepas—as if the tone of the
establishment were sordid. But such was not at all the case. We were
simply very _bourgeois_; we practised the good old Genevese principle of
not sacrificing to appearances. This is an excellent principle—when you
have the reality. We had the reality at the Pension Beaurepas: we had it
in the shape of soft short beds, equipped with fluffy _duvets_; of
admirable coffee, served to us in the morning by Célestine in person, as
we lay recumbent on these downy couches; of copious, wholesome, succulent
dinners, conformable to the best provincial traditions. For myself, I
thought the Pension Beaurepas picturesque, and this, with me, at that
time was a great word. I was young and ingenuous: I had just come from
America. I wished to perfect myself in the French tongue, and I
innocently believed that it flourished by Lake Leman. I used to go to
lectures at the Academy, and come home with a violent appetite. I always
enjoyed my morning walk across the long bridge (there was only one, just
there, in those days) which spans the deep blue out-gush of the lake, and
up the dark steep streets of the old Calvinistic city. The garden faced
this way, toward the lake and the old town; and this was the pleasantest
approach to the house. There was a high wall, with a double gate in the
middle, flanked by a couple of ancient massive posts; the big rusty
_grille_ contained some old-fashioned iron-work. The garden was rather
mouldy and weedy, tangled and untended; but it contained a little
thin-flowing fountain, several green benches, a rickety little table of
the same complexion, and three orange-trees, in tubs, which were
deposited as effectively as possible in front of the windows of the
_salon_.