CHAPTER ONE
Madame Bathilde Chalumeau, her black cotton frock tucked up round her plump figure over her scarlet-flannel petticoat, was dusting the windows of her shop in the Rue Dessous l'Arche.
It was only six o'clock and the air as yet was cool, but the trees leaning over the wall of Avocat Millot's garden opposite were grey with dust and parched with the heat of an exceptionally warm September.
Madame Chalumeau, who was standing on a chair energetically flopping her feather-brush over the panes of her double shop-front, sighed as she looked up at the brilliant sky. "It is to be a heat of the devil," she thought.
Next door to her, chez Bouillard, nothing was stirring. Poor Désiré, being a widower, was apt to oversleep himself, and it was bad for his trade. Even now a small child in a black smock stood at his door, waiting to fill his carafe with the black wine that had stained its sides to such a beautiful violet hue.
"Bonjour, Christophe——"
"Bonjour, madame."
"You want wine?"
"Oui, madame."
"Then wait a moment and I will get it for thee."
Good Madame Chalumeau climbed down from her chair with a generous display of fat, black woollen legs and unpinned her skirt.
"Bon! M. Bouillard sleeps the fat morning, but I can get in, and you will get a beating if you keep your excellent father waiting."
Taking the carafe, she passed under the archway that separated her house from her neighbour's, and, her broad figure actually touching the wall on either side, went to Bouillard's side-door and entered the house.
When she came out, the carafe full, Bouillard himself, fat and rosy with sleep, was standing in his shop door. "Madame Bathilde, good day to you! So you have again saved me from a commercial loss!" Désiré Bouillard had a witty way with him, his far shrewder neighbour thought—had thought for years.
And then, quite without consciousness or amusement, they enacted the little comedy that had been played by them every morning since poor Madame Bouillard died.
"And your morning coffee, M. Bouillard?"
"Tiens, mon café! Hélas non, Madame Bathilde, I am but this moment awake—what time is it?"
Just inside the door of Madame Chalumeau's shop, Au Gout Parisien, hung a clock.
"It is ten minutes to seven."
"Eh, bien, au revoir, Madame Bathilde—I must go and set things going in my small household. Alas, poor Joséphine!"
Madame Chalumeau shook her head with great gravity.
"A great loss, M. Bouillard; an irreparable loss. But—my coffee is nearly ready. Will you not let me give you a cup? There are also an Auvergnat" (a double twist of well-made bread) "and a Bourdon sent me by my cousin, Madame Decomplet, of the Rue d'Argentan——"
And ten minutes later the two gossips, as the pleasant old phrase runs, were seated in Madame Chalumeau's little sitting-room behind her shop, breakfasting together.
Monsieur Bouillard's Joséphine had been dead for seven long years, and in her life she had tormented the good man full sore; even as the Church invariably defers canonisation until long after the death of the saint, so Désiré's appreciation of his wife's splendour of character was a post-mortem tribute to be accepted without a murmur by all the faithful.
"I recall to myself every morning, Madame Bathilde," he began, removing a large blob of honey from the dimple in his pink chin, "how that angel used to arise and prepare herself for her day's work. And of an economy! Charcoal did for her four times what it will for me. And times are hard!"
Bathilde sighed sympathetically. "My faith, yes; she was a wonderful manager, pauvre ange. The milk is at your elbow, M. Désiré——"
Outside in her tiny garden a bee boomed somnolently among the red and yellow flowers, and somewhere near at hand a church bell jerked its unmusical summons to prayer.
Madame Chalumeau's face, glossy and red-and-white like a Norman apple, wore an expression of anxious expectation. Moreover, she had put on a narrow lace collar and pinned it with a coral brooch. It was the fifth of the month.
M. Désiré ate his way through the generously laid meal with comfort and deliberation, his small blue eyes, deeply embedded in pink flesh, twinkling with ease.
As the clock struck half-past seven he laid his knife down and wiped his beardless mouth.
"Bathilde," he said, "you are very kind to a poor afflicted mourner."
"Ah—Désiré!"
She was a woman of much sense, and she did not try to be coy.
"My heart, as you know, lies in the grave with my poor Joséphine——"
"But of course, my dear friend——"
"But—man is not fit to live all alone. And I am convinced that if I could ask her, that angel would——" He paused and looked approvingly round the tidy, comfortable little room.
"Yes—Désiré? She would——"
"I think she would—wish me to do the best I can for myself. And that, of course—I mean to say I imagine——"
Poor Bathilde's hopes died suddenly.
"She was always so generous-minded," she murmured, folding her plump hands.
He rose and walked to the shop door.
"Anything new to show me, chère Madame Chalumeau?" he asked briskly.
"Yes; some coloured tablecloths, very pretty, at one franc seventy-five—and—some other things. But, Désiré, you were saying about living alone—that you thought Joséphine would be glad——"
"I did not say she would be glad, Madame Chalumeau. My wife was never glad about anything. I said—in fact, I may as well be quite frank," he continued, turning to her, "I am a lonely man, and I am—greatly attracted to you, dear friend. But as I have told you before, I—I cannot quite make up my mind as to whether I should be happier if I married you."
"I could make you very comfortable, Désiré, and I, too, am lonely. Besides, your accounts are very confused, and I could save you much money in that way."
A shrewd woman, this, but greatly mistaken in her methods. A useless, lazy, coquettish woman would have married the man years before, but poor Bathilde's very frankness was her undoing.
"Yes, yes," he returned impatiently, "I know all that, and my affection for you is great. But as to marriage—I cannot yet make up my mind. And in the meantime I must leave you, dear friend, for it is late. A thousand thanks for the delicious breakfast——" and he was gone.