that those great, ugly things, in which there were so many nude men,
deducted from the housekeeping supply, ventured upon remonstrance and
tried to check such ruinous extravagance. Monsieur de Varandeuil lost
his temper, waxed wroth like a man who was ashamed to find one of his
blood so deficient in taste, and told her that that was her fortune and
that she would see later if he was an old fool. At last she induced him
to realize. The sale took place; it was a failure, one of the most
complete shipwrecks of illusions that the glazed hall of the Hotel
Bullion has ever seen. Stung to the quick, furious with rage at this
blow, which not only involved pecuniary loss and a serious inroad upon
his little fortune, but was also a direct denial of his claims to
connoisseurship, a slap at his knowledge of art delivered upon the cheek
of his Raphaels, Monsieur de Varandeuil informed his daughter that they
were too poor to remain in Paris and that they must go into the
provinces to live. Having been cradled and reared in an epoch little
adapted to inspire a love of country life in women, Mademoiselle de
Varandeuil tried vainly to combat her father's resolution: she was
obliged to go with him wherever he chose to go, and, by leaving Paris,
to lose the society and friendship of two young kinswomen, to whom, in
their too infrequent interviews, she had partly given her confidence,
and whose hearts she had felt reaching out to her as to an older sister.

Monsieur de Varandeuil hired a small house at L'Isle-Adam. There he was
near familiar scenes, in the atmosphere of what was formerly a little
court, close at hand to two or three chateaux, whose owners he knew, and
which were beginning to throw open their doors once more. Then, too,
since the Revolution a little community of well-to-do bourgeois, rich
shopkeepers, had settled upon this territory which once belonged to the
Contis. The name of Monsieur de Varandeuil sounded very grand in the
ears of all those good people. They bowed very low to him, they
contended for the honor of entertaining him, they listened
respectfully, almost devoutly, to the stories he told of society as it
was. And thus, flattered, caressed, honored as a relic of Versailles, he
had the place of honor and the prestige of a lord among them. When he
dined with Madame Mutel, a former baker, who had forty thousand francs a
year, the hostess left the table, silk dress and all, to go and fry the
oyster plants herself: