height, was so thin that
the waist measured less than twenty inches. Her small features, which
clustered close about the nose, gave her face a vague resemblance to a
weasel's snout. Though she was past thirty years old she looked scarcely
more than sixteen. Her eyes, of porcelain blue, overweighted by heavy
eyelids which fell nearly straight from the arch of the eyebrows, had
little light in them. Everything about her appearance was commonplace:
witness her flaxen hair, tending to whiteness; her flat forehead, from
which the light did not reflect; and her dull complexion, with gray,
almost leaden, tones. The lower part of the face, more triangular than
oval, ended irregularly the otherwise irregular outline of her face.
Her voice had a rather pretty range of intonation, from sharp to sweet.
Elisabeth was a perfect specimen of the second-rate little bourgeoisie
who lectures her husband behind the curtains; obtains no credit for her
virtues; is ambitious without intelligent object, and solely through the
development of her domestic selfishness. Had she lived in the country
she would have bought up adjacent land; being, as she was, connected
with the administration, she was determined to push her way. If we
relate the life of her father and mother, we shall show the sort of
woman she was by a picture of her childhood and youth.

Monsieur Saillard married the daughter of an upholsterer keeping shop
under the arcades of the Market. Limited means compelled Monsieur and
Madame Saillard at their start in life to bear constant privation. After
thirty-three years of married life, and twenty-nine years of toil in
a government office, the property of "the Saillards"--their circle
of acquaintance called them so--consisted of sixty thousand francs
entrusted to Falleix, the house in the place Royale, bought for forty
thousand in 1804, and thirty-six thousand francs given in dowry to their
daughter Elisabeth. Out of this capital about fifty thousand came
to them by the will of the widow Bidault, Madame Saillard's mother.
Saillard's salary from the government had always been four thousand five
hundred francs a year, and no more; his situation was a blind alley
that led nowhere, and had tempted no one to supersede him. Those ninety
thousand francs, put together sou by sou, were the fruit therefore of a
sordid economy unintelligently employed. In fact, the Saillards did
not know how better to manage their savings than to carry them, five