the tribunal. You know him, and you can
judge whether I am happy or not, with my heart _saturated_, as it is,
with our ideas. I was not ignorant what my lot would be: I live with
the ex-president, my husband's uncle, and with my mother-in-law, who has
preserved nothing of the ancient parliamentary society of Aix but its
pride and its severity of manners. I am seldom alone, I never go out
unless accompanied by my mother-in-law or my husband. We receive the
heavy people of the city in the evening. They play whist at two sous a
point, and I listen to conversations of this nature:

"'Monsieur Vitremont is dead, and leaves two hundred and eighty thousand
francs,' says the associate judge, a young man of forty-seven, who is as
entertaining as a northwest wind.

"'Are you quite sure of that?'

"The _that_ refers to the two hundred and eighty thousand francs. A
little judge then holds forth, he runs over the investments, the others
discuss their value, and it is definitely settled that if he has not
left two hundred and eighty thousand, he left something near it.

"Then comes a universal concert of eulogy heaped upon the dead man's
body, for having kept his bread under lock and key, for having shrewdly
invested his little savings accumulated sou by sou, in order, probably,
that the whole city and those who expect legacies may applaud and
exclaim in admiration, 'He leaves two hundred and eighty thousand
francs!' Now everybody has rich relations of whom they say 'Will he
leave anything like it?' and thus they discuss the quick as they have
discussed the dead.

"They talk of nothing but the prospects of fortune, the prospects of a
vacancy in office, the prospects of the harvest.

"When we were children, and used to look at those pretty little white
mice, in the cobbler's window in the rue St. Maclou, that turned and
turned the circular cage in which they were imprisoned, how far I was
from thinking that they would one day be a faithful image of my life!

"Think of it, my being in this condition!--I who fluttered my wings so
much more than you, I whose imagination was so vagabond! My sins have
been greater than yours, and I am the more severely punished. I have
bidden farewell to my dreams: I am _Madame la Presidente_ in all my
glory, and I resign myself to giving my arm for forty years to my
big awkward Roulandiere, to living meanly in every way, and to having
forever before me two heavy brows and two wall-eyes pierced in