tte_ has a dozen
allied meanings, but it suffices to give it here as: _To dupe_. Monsieur
de Rochefide, like all little minds, was terribly afraid of being
_carotte_. The noun has become a verb. From the very start of his
passion for Madame Schontz, Arthur was on his guard, and he was,
therefore, very _rat_, to use another word of the same vocabulary. The
word _rat_, when applied to a young girl, means the guest or the one
entertained, but applied to a man it signifies the giver of the feast
who is niggardly.

Madame Schontz had too much sense and she knew men too well not to
conceive great hopes from such a beginning. Monsieur de Rochefide
allowed her five hundred francs a month, furnished for her, rather
shabbily, an apartment costing twelve hundred francs a year on a
second floor in the rue Coquenard, and set himself to study Aurelie's
character, while she, perceiving his object, gave him a character to
study. Consequently, Rochefide became happy in meeting with a woman of
noble nature. But he saw nothing surprising in that; her mother was
a Barnheim of Baden, a well-bred woman. Besides, Aurelie was so well
brought up herself! Speaking English, German, and Italian, she possessed
a thorough knowledge of foreign literatures. She could hold her own
against all second-class pianists. And, remark this! she behaved about
her talents like a well-bred woman; she never mentioned them. She picked
up a brush in a painter's studio, used it half jestingly, and produced
a head which caused general astonishment. For mere amusement during
the time she pined as under-mistress at Saint-Denis, she had made some
advance in the domain of the sciences, but her subsequent life had
covered these good seeds with a coating of salt, and she now gave Arthur
the credit of the sprouting of the precious germs, re-cultivated for
him.

Thus Aurelie began by showing a disinterestedness equal to her other
charms, which allowed this weak corvette to attach its grapnels securely
to the larger vessel. Nevertheless, about the end of the first year, she
made ignoble noises in the antechamber with her clogs, coming in about
the time when the marquis was awaiting her, and hiding, as best she
could, the draggled tail of an outrageously muddy gown. In short, she
had by this time so perfectly persuaded her _gros papa_ that all
her ambition, after so many ups and downs, was to obtain honorably a
comfortable little bourgeois existence, that, about ten months af