income of eleven
hundred francs per annum derived from this source was, at one time, her
whole fortune. For many a year the neighbors used to see the doctor's
linen hanging out to dry upon a clothes-line in the garden, and the
servant and Mme. Poulain thriftily washed everything at home; a piece of
domestic economy which did not a little to injure the doctor's practice,
for it was thought that if he was so poor, it must be through his own
fault. Her eleven hundred francs scarcely did more than pay the rent.
During those early days, Mme. Poulain, good, stout, little old woman,
was the breadwinner, and the poor household lived upon her earnings.
After twelve years of perseverance upon a rough and stony road, Dr.
Poulain at last was making an income of three thousand francs, and Mme.
Poulain had an income of about five thousand francs at her disposal.
Five thousand francs for those who know Paris means a bare subsistence.

The sitting-room, where patients waited for an interview, was shabbily
furnished. There was the inevitable mahogany sofa covered with
yellow-flowered Utrecht velvet, four easy-chairs, a tea-table, a
console, and half-a-dozen chairs, all the property of the deceased
breeches-maker, and chosen by him. A lyre-shaped clock between two
Egyptian candlesticks still preserved its glass shade intact. You
asked yourself how the yellow chintz window-curtains, covered with red
flowers, had contrived to hang together for so long; for evidently they
had come from the Jouy factory, and Oberkampf received the Emperor's
congratulations upon similar hideous productions of the cotton industry
in 1809.

The doctor's consulting-room was fitted up in the same style,
with household stuff from the paternal chamber. It looked stiff,
poverty-stricken, and bare. What patient could put faith in the skill of
any unknown doctor who could not even furnish his house? And this in a
time when advertising is all-powerful; when we gild the gas-lamps in
the Place de la Concorde to console the poor man for his poverty by
reminding him that he is rich as a citizen.

The ante-chamber did duty as a dining-room. The servant sat at her
sewing there whenever she was not busy in the kitchen or keeping the
doctor's mother company. From the dingy short curtains in the windows
you would have guessed at the shabby thrift behind them without setting
foot in the dreary place. What could those wall-cupboards contain but
stale scraps of food, chipped ea