had extracted all the gravy for a brave
soldier just home from Algiers. "Great evils demand heroic remedies."

"Valerie, where are you off to?" cried Marneffe, standing between his
wife and the door.

"I am going to see the landlord," she replied, arranging her ringlets
under her smart bonnet. "You had better try to make friends with that
old maid, if she really is your chief's cousin."

The ignorance in which the dwellers under one roof can exist as to the
social position of their fellow-lodgers is a permanent fact which, as
much as any other, shows what the rush of Paris life is. Still, it is
easily conceivable that a clerk who goes early every morning to his
office, comes home only to dinner, and spends every evening out, and a
woman swallowed up in a round of pleasures, should know nothing of an
old maid living on the third floor beyond the courtyard of the house
they dwell in, especially when she lives as Mademoiselle Fischer did.

Up in the morning before any one else, Lisbeth went out to buy her
bread, milk, and live charcoal, never speaking to any one, and she went
to bed with the sun; she never had a letter or a visitor, nor chatted
with her neighbors. Here was one of those anonymous, entomological
existences such as are to be met with in many large tenements where,
at the end of four years, you unexpectedly learn that up on the fourth
floor there is an old man lodging who knew Voltaire, Pilatre de Rozier,
Beaujon, Marcel, Mole, Sophie Arnould, Franklin, and Robespierre. What
Monsieur and Madame Marneffe had just said concerning Lisbeth Fischer
they had come to know, in consequence, partly, of the loneliness of the
neighborhood, and of the alliance, to which their necessities had led,
between them and the doorkeepers, whose goodwill was too important to
them not to have been carefully encouraged.

Now, the old maid's pride, silence, and reserve had engendered in the
porter and his wife the exaggerated respect and cold civility which
betray the unconfessed annoyance of an inferior. Also, the porter
thought himself in all essentials the equal of any lodger whose rent was
no more than two hundred and fifty francs. Cousin Betty's confidences
to Hortense were true; and it is evident that the porter's wife might be
very likely to slander Mademoiselle Fischer in her intimate gossip with
the Marneffes, while only intending to tell tales.

When Lisbeth had taken her candle from the hands of worthy Madame
Oliv