have a
description of these shopkeepers, male and female. They rejoiced in
the possession of a handsome ground floor and a strip of garden; for
amusement, they watched a little squirt of water, no bigger than a
cornstalk, perpetually rising and falling upon a small round freestone
slab in the middle of a basin some six feet across; they would rise
early of a morning to see if the plants in the garden had grown in the
night; they had nothing to do, they were restless, they dressed for the
sake of dressing, bored themselves at the theatre, and were for ever
going to and fro between Paris and Luzarches, where they had a country
house. I have dined there.

"Once they tried to quiz me, Blondet. I told them a long-winded story
that lasted from nine o'clock till midnight, one tale inside another.
I had just brought my twenty-ninth personage upon the scene (the
newspapers have plagiarized with their 'continued in our next'), when
old Matifat, who as host still held out, snored like the rest, after
blinking for five minutes. Next day they all complimented me upon the
ending of my tale!

"These tradespeople's society consisted of M. and Mme. Cochin, Mme.
Desroches, and a young Popinot, still in the drug business, who used
to bring them news of the Rue des Lombards. (You know him, Finot.) Mme.
Matifat loved the arts; she bought lithographs, chromo-lithographs, and
colored prints,--all the cheapest things she could lay her hands on. The
Sieur Matifat amused himself by looking into new business speculations,
investing a little capital now and again for the sake of the excitement.
Florine had cured him of his taste for the Regency style of thing. One
saying of his will give you some idea of the depths in my Matifat. 'Art
_thou_ going to bed, my nieces?' he used to say when he wished them
good-night, because (as he explained) he was afraid of hurting their
feelings with the more formal 'you.'

"The daughter was a girl with no manner at all. She looked rather like a
superior sort of housemaid. She could get through a sonata, she wrote
a pretty English hand, knew French grammar and orthography--a complete
commercial education, in short. She was impatient enough to be married
and leave the paternal roof, finding it as dull at home as a lieutenant
finds the nightwatch at sea; at the same time, it should be said that
her watch lasted through the whole twenty-four hours. Desroches or
Cochin junior, a notary or a lifeguardsman, or a sham