h she had reckoned her
journey to Paris, which to a grisette of Alencon seemed considerable.
Besides, she hated du Bousquier. The latter had evidently feared a
revelation of his supposed misconduct to Madame Granson; and Suzanne, at
the risk of not getting a penny from the society, was possessed with
the desire, on leaving Alencon, of entangling the old bachelor in the
inextricable meshes of a provincial slander. In all grisettes there is
something of the malevolent mischief of a monkey. Accordingly, Suzanne
now went to see Madame Granson, composing her face to an expression of
the deepest dejection.

CHAPTER III. ATHANASE

Madame Granson, widow of a lieutenant-colonel of artillery killed at
Jena, possessed, as her whole means of livelihood, a meagre pension of
nine hundred francs a year, and three hundred francs from property of
her own, plus a son whose support and education had eaten up all her
savings. She occupied, in the rue du Bercail, one of those melancholy
ground-floor apartments which a traveller passing along the principal
street of a little provincial town can look through at a glance. The
street door opened at the top of three steep steps; a passage led to an
interior courtyard, at the end of which was the staircase covered by a
wooden gallery. On one side of the passage was the dining-room and the
kitchen; on the other side, a salon put to many uses, and the widow's
bedchamber.

Athanase Granson, a young man twenty-three years of age, who slept in an
attic room above the second floor of the house, added six hundred francs
to the income of his poor mother, by the salary of a little place which
the influence of his relation, Mademoiselle Cormon, had obtained for him
in the mayor's office, where he was placed in charge of the archives.

From these indications it is easy to imagine Madame Granson in her
cold salon with its yellow curtains and Utrecht velvet furniture, also
yellow, as she straightened the round straw mats which were placed
before each chair, that visitors might not soil the red-tiled floor
while they sat there; after which she returned to her cushioned
armchair and little work-table placed beneath the portrait of the
lieutenant-colonel of artillery between two windows,--a point from which
her eye could rake the rue du Bercail and see all comers. She was a good
woman, dressed with bourgeois simplicity in keeping with her wan face
furrowed by grief. The rigorous humbleness of poverty