I
I was not rich—on the contrary; and I had been told the Pension Beaurepas
was cheap. I had further been told that a boarding-house is a capital
place for the study of human nature. I was inclined to a literary career
and a friend had said to me: “If you mean to write you ought to go and
live in a boarding-house: there’s no other such way to pick up material.”
I had read something of this kind in a letter addressed by the celebrated
Stendhal to his sister: “I have a passionate desire to know human nature,
and a great mind to live in a boarding-house, where people can’t conceal
their real characters.” I was an admirer of _La Chartreuse de Parme_,
and easily believed one couldn’t 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
generous cool fountain. That approach was not prepossessing, for on
crossing the threshold you found yourself more or less in the
kitchen—amid the “offices” and struck with their assault on your nostril.
This, however, was no great matter, for at the Pension Beaurepas things
conformed frankly to their nature and the whole mechanism lay bare. It
was rather primitive, the mechanism, but it worked in a friendly homely
regular way. Madame Beaurepas was an honest little old woman—she was far
advanced in life and had been keeping a pension for more than 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-four, she wore stacks of flowers in her cap. There was a legend
in the house that she wasn’t so deaf as she pretended and that she
feigned this infirmity in order to possess herself of the secrets of her
lodgers. I never indeed subscribed to this theory, convinced as I became
that Madame Beaurepas had outlived the period of indiscreet curiosity.
She dealt with the present and the future in the steady light of a long
experience; she had been having lodgers for nearly half a century and all
her concern with them was that they should pay their bills, fold their
napkins and make use of the doormat. She cared very little for their
secrets. “J’en ai vus de toutes les couleurs,” she said to me. She had
quite ceased to trouble about individuals; she cared only for types and
clear categories. Her large observation had made her acquainted with a
number of these and her mind become a complete collection of “heads.”
She flattered herself that she knew at a glance where to pigeonhole a
new-comer, and if she made mistakes her deportment never betrayed them.
I felt that as regards particular persons—once they conformed to the few
rules—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 been
satisfied to remark that this receptacle was not the place for arsenic.
She could have imagined it otherwise and suitably applied. 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 isn’t to cut a figure in the world; I’ve
never so flattered myself,” I remember hearing her say; “and when you pay
seven francs a day, tout compris, it comprises everything but the right
to look down on the others. Yet there are people who, the less they pay,
take themselves the more au sérieux. My most difficult boarders have
always been those who’ve fiercely bargained and had the cheapest 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; as
Célestine the cook shrouded herself in no mystery and announced the day’s
fare, amid her fumes, quite with the resonance of the priestess of the
tripod foretelling the future. 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 meals 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 door-step 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 proceeded but in
a makeshift fashion at the Pension Beaurepas—as if we suffered from a
sordid tone. 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. Nothing can be better than that principle
when the rich real underlies it. We had the rich real 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 local colour,
and this, with me, at that time, was a grand term. I was young and
ingenuous and had just come from America. I wished to perfect myself in
the French tongue and innocently believed it to flourish by Lake Leman.
I used to go to lectures at the Academy, the nursing mother of the
present University, 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 gave properest access to
the house. There was a high wall with a double gate in the middle and
flanked by a couple of ancient massive posts; the big rusty grille
bristled with old-fashioned iron-work. The garden was rather mouldy and
weedy, tangled and untended; but it contained a small thin-flowing
fountain, several green benches, a rickety little table of the same
complexion, together with three orange-trees in tubs disposed as
effectively as possible in front of the windows of the salon.