to seven or
eight hundred francs, add tips at New Year, and the pair had altogether
in income of sixteen hundred francs, every penny of which they spent,
for the Cibots lived and fared better than working people usually do.
"One can only live once," La Cibot used to say. She was born during the
Revolution, you see, and had never learned her Catechism.

The husband of this portress with the unblenching tawny eyes was an
object of envy to the whole fraternity, for La Cibot had not forgotten
the knowledge of cookery picked up at the _Cadran Bleu_. So it had come
to pass that the Cibots had passed the prime of life, and saw themselves
on the threshold of old age without a hundred francs put by for the
future. Well clad and well fed, they enjoyed among the neighbors, it is
true, the respect due to twenty-six years of strict honesty; for if
they had nothing of their own, they "hadn't nothing belonging to nobody
else," according to La Cibot, who was a prodigal of negatives. "There
wasn't never such a love of a man," she would say to her husband. Do you
ask why? You might as well ask the reason of her indifference in matters
of religion.

Both of them were proud of a life lived in open day, of the esteem in
which they were held for six or seven streets round about, and of the
autocratic rule permitted to them by the proprietor ("perprietor," they
called him); but in private they groaned because they had no money lying
at interest. Cibot complained of pains in his hands and legs, and his
wife would lament that her poor, dear Cibot should be forced to work
at his age; and, indeed, the day is not far distant when a porter after
thirty years of such a life will cry shame upon the injustice of the
Government and clamor for the ribbon of the Legion of Honor. Every
time that the gossip of the quarter brought news of such and such a
servant-maid, left an annuity of three or four hundred francs after
eight or ten years of service, the porters' lodges would resound with
complaints, which may give some idea of the consuming jealousies in the
lowest walks of life in Paris.

"Oh, indeed! It will never happen to the like of us to have our names
mentioned in a will! We have no luck, but we do more than servants,
for all that. We fill a place of trust; we give receipts, we are on the
lookout for squalls, and yet we are treated like dogs, neither more nor
less, and that's the truth!"

"Some find fortune and some miss fortune," said Cibot, c