"and who are the strangers? Are you one, Papa Brigaud?
Are you one, Monsieur Raoul? You are not a stranger, you are a lodger."
And, taking a knife and fork, he set to work in a manner to make up for
lost time.

"Pardieu! madame," said the chevalier, "I see with pleasure that I am
further advanced than I thought I was. I did not know that I had the
honor of being known to Monsieur Boniface."

"It would be odd if I did not know you," said the lawyer's clerk, with
his mouth full; "you have got my bedroom."

"How, Madame Denis!" said D'Harmental, "and you left me in ignorance
that I had the honor to succeed in my room to the heir apparent of your
family? I am no longer astonished to find my room so gayly fitted up; I
recognize the cares of a mother."

"Yes, much good may it do you; but I have one bit of advice to give you.
Don't look out of window too much."

"Why?" asked D'Harmental.

"Why? because you have a certain neighbor opposite you."

"Mademoiselle Bathilde," said the chevalier, carried away by his first
impulse.

"Ah! you know that already?" answered Boniface; "good, good, good; that
will do."----"Will you be quiet, monsieur!" cried Madame Denis.

"Listen!" answered Boniface; "one must inform one's lodgers when one has
prohibited things about one's house. You are not in a lawyer's office;
you do not know that."

"The child is full of wit," said the Abbe Brigaud in that bantering
tone, thanks to which it was impossible to know whether he was serious
or not.

"But," answered Madame Denis, "what would you have in common between
Monsieur Raoul and Bathilde?"

"What in common? Why, in a week, he will be madly in love with her, and
it is not worth loving a coquette."

"A coquette?" said D'Harmental.

"Yes, a coquette, a coquette," said Boniface; "I have said it, and I do
not draw back. A coquette, who flirts with the young men and lives with
an old one, without counting that little brute of a Mirza, who eats up
all my bon-bons, and now bites me every time she meets me."

"Leave the room, mesdemoiselles," cried Madame Denis, rising and making
her daughters rise also. "Leave the room. Ears so pure as yours ought
not to hear such things."

And she pushed Mademoiselle Athenais and Mademoiselle Emilie toward the
door of their room, where she entered with them.

As to D'Harmental, he felt a violent desire to break Boniface's head
with a wine-bottle. Nevertheless, seeing the absurdity of the situation,
he