d a
member of the consulting board for the clothing of the Army. Since her
husband had stood so high in office, Madame Guillaume had decided
that she must receive; her rooms were so crammed with gold and silver
ornaments, and furniture, tasteless but of undoubted value, that the
simplest room in the house looked like a chapel. Economy and expense
seemed to be struggling for the upper hand in every accessory. It was as
though Monsieur Guillaume had looked to a good investment, even in the
purchase of a candlestick. In the midst of this bazaar, where splendor
revealed the owner's want of occupation, Sommervieux's famous picture
filled the place of honor, and in it Monsieur and Madame Guillaume found
their chief consolation, turning their eyes, harnessed with eye-glasses,
twenty times a day on this presentment of their past life, to them so
active and amusing. The appearance of this mansion and these rooms,
where everything had an aroma of staleness and mediocrity, the spectacle
offered by these two beings, cast away, as it were, on a rock far from
the world and the ideas which are life, startled Augustine; she could
here contemplate the sequel of the scene of which the first part had
struck her at the house of Lebas--a life of stir without movement, a
mechanical and instinctive existence like that of the beaver; and then
she felt an indefinable pride in her troubles, as she reflected that
they had their source in eighteen months of such happiness as, in her
eyes, was worth a thousand lives like this; its vacuity seemed to her
horrible. However, she concealed this not very charitable feeling, and
displayed for her parents her newly-acquired accomplishments of mind,
and the ingratiating tenderness that love had revealed to her, disposing
them to listen to her matrimonial grievances. Old people have a weakness
for this kind of confidence. Madame Guillaume wanted to know the most
trivial details of that alien life, which to her seemed almost fabulous.
The travels of Baron da la Houtan, which she began again and again and
never finished, told her nothing more unheard-of concerning the Canadian
savages.

"What, child, your husband shuts himself into a room with naked women!
And you are so simple as to believe that he draws them?"

As she uttered this exclamation, the grandmother laid her spectacles
on a little work-table, shook her skirts, and clasped her hands on her
knees, raised by a foot-warmer, her favorite pedestal.

"