into vacancy like the melancholy imbecile that he was, and
forgot to shave. These alternations of tenderness and severity worked
upon this feeble creature whose only life was through his amorous fibre,
the same morbid effect which great changes from tropical heat to arctic
cold produce upon the human body. It was a moral pleurisy, which wore
him out like a physical disease. Flore alone could thus affect him; for
to her, and to her alone, he was as good as he was foolish.

"Well, haven't you shaved yet?" she said, appearing at his door.

Her sudden presence made the old man start violently; and from being
pale and cast down he grew red for an instant, without, however, daring
to complain of her treatment.

"Your breakfast is waiting," she added. "You can come down as you are,
in dressing-gown and slippers; for you'll breakfast alone, I can tell
you."

Without waiting for an answer, she disappeared. To make him breakfast
alone was the punishment he dreaded most; he loved to talk to her as
he ate his meals. When he got to the foot of the staircase he was taken
with a fit of coughing; for emotion excited his catarrh.

"Cough away!" said Flore in the kitchen, without caring whether he heard
her or not. "Confound the old wretch! he is able enough to get over
it without bothering others. If he coughs up his soul, it will only be
after--"

Such were the amenities the Rabouilleuse addressed to Rouget when she
was angry. The poor man sat down in deep distress at a corner of the
table in the middle of the room, and looked at his old furniture and the
old pictures with a disconsolate air.

"You might at least have put on a cravat," said Flore. "Do you think it
is pleasant for people to see such a neck as yours, which is redder and
more wrinkled than a turkey's?"

"But what have I done?" he asked, lifting his big light-green eyes, full
of tears, to his tormentor, and trying to face her hard countenance.

"What have you done?" she exclaimed. "As if you didn't know? Oh, what a
hypocrite! Your sister Agathe--who is as much your sister as I am sister
of the tower of Issoudun, if one's to believe your father, and who has
no claim at all upon you--is coming here from Paris with her son, a
miserable two-penny painter, to see you."

"My sister and my nephews coming to Issoudun!" he said, bewildered.

"Oh, yes! play the surprised, do; try to make me believe you didn't
send for them! sewing your lies with white bread, indeed! Don'