"No. Ah, now, speaking of that, my cousin sent me, a few days ago, a customer. May the devil burn me, if I can understand it! Come, another turn?"
"Agreed; the liquor is good. Your health, Micou!"
"Yours, lad! I say, then, that the other day my cousin sent me a customer whom I cannot make out. Just imagine a mother and her daughter, who had a very seedy look, it is true; they carried their luggage in a handkerchief. Well, although they must, of course, be nobody, since they had no papers, and they lodge by the fortnight; since they have been here they do not stir out; no one comes to see them, my pal—no one! and yet, if they were not so thin and so pale, they'd be two fine women, the little one above all. She is not more than fifteen at least; she is as white as a white rabbit, with large black eyes—large as that! What eyes! what eyes!"
"You'll get on fire again; I'll call the engines! What do these women do for a living?"
"I tell you I comprehend nothing about it; they must be virtuous, and yet no papers; without counting that they receive letters without address, their name must be bad to write."
"How is that?"
"They sent, this morning, my nephew Andre to the office of the letters to be called for, to reclaim a letter addressed to Madame X. Z. The letter was to come from Normandy, from a place called Aubiers. They wrote that on a piece of paper, so that Andre might get the letter. You see they can be no great things, women who take the name of X and a Z."
"They will never pay you."
"It is not for an old ape like me to learn to make faces. They have taken a room without a fireplace, for which I make them pay twenty francs a fortnight, and in advance. They are, perhaps, sick; for two days they have not come down. It certainly is not from indigestion; for I do not think they have cooked anything since they have been here."
"If you had only such lodgers as they, Micou—"