and love adventures were notorious formerly, had for the
last two or three years buried herself in a little house, fearing that
she would be assassinated; she kept her diamonds in iron-lined safes
built in the wall, and had a young lover, a clerk in a novelty store,
who was stronger than a market-house porter, and who from time to time
assumed a high tone and before whom she stood in awe.

"Claire Dujarrier! The very thing!--Why not?" thought Marianne.

She had been introduced to the ex-danseuse by Guy de Lissac. He was
considered as one of Claire's old lovers. They quarrelled when the old
dame had heard one of Guy's bons mots that had become familiar at the
Club:

"When I see her, I always feel a slight emotion: she recalls my youth to
me!--But alas! not hers!"

Claire was well-off and perhaps miserly. Marianne instinctively felt,
however, that she would get help at her hands.

Money!

"I will return her all! It is usury. Her pledge is here!"

With brazen front, Kayser's niece struck her bosom, looking at the same
time at the reflection of her fine bust and pale face in the mirror.

The next day she went straight to the former danseuse's.

Claire Dujarrier lived in that long Rue La Fontaine at Auteuil which
partook of the characteristics of a suburban main street and a
provincial faubourg, with its summer villas, its little cottages
enclosed within gloomy little gardens, railed-off flower-beds,
boarding-schools for young people, and elbowing each other as in some
village passage, the butcher's store, the pharmacy, the wine-dealer's
shop, the baker's establishment,--a kind of little summer resort with a
forlorn look in February, the kiosks and cottages half decayed, the
gardens full of faded, dreary-looking leaves. Marianne looked about,
seeking the little Claire house. She had visited it formerly. A
policeman wandered along sadly,--as if to remind one of the town,--and
on one side, a gardener passed scuffling his wooden shoes, as if to
recall the village.

However, here it was that the formerly celebrated girl, who awoke storms
of applause when she danced beside Cerrito at the Opera, now lived
buried in silence,--a cab going to the Villa Montmorency seemed an event
in her eyes,--forgotten, her windows shut, and as a diversion looking
through the shutters at the high chimneys of some factory in the
neighboring Rue Gras that belched forth their ruddy or bluish fumes, or
yellow like sulphuric acid, or again r