"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.