'You look rather pale,' observed Madame Offarel aggressively, 'aren't you well?'
'Shall I make room for you here, Monsieur René?' asked Rosalie, with a timid smile; 'I'll take away papa's hat.'
'Give it to me,' said old Offarel, perceiving a place for it on the sideboard; 'it will be safer here. It's my Number One, and mamma would scold me if any harm came to it.'
'It's been Number One for such a long time,' cried Angélique, with a laugh. 'Look here, papa, here's a real Number One,' she added, holding up René's hat under the lamp-light and comparing its glossy nap with the shabby silk and old-fashioned shape of her father's headgear, much to the latter's disadvantage.
'But nothing is too good for Monsieur René now,' observed Madame Offarel with her usual acrimony, venting the rest of her displeasure upon Angélique, whose action had annoyed her. 'You'll be lucky if your husband is always as well dressed as your father.'
René was seated by Rosalie's side, and let the epigram of the terrible bourgeoise pass unnoticed, taking no part either in the rest of the conversation, which Emilie wisely led round to cookery topics. Madame Offarel was almost as keen on this subject as she was on that of her feline pets. Not content with having recipes of her own for all kinds of dishes, such as coulis d'écrevisses, her triumph, and canard sauce Offarel, as she had proudly named it, she also kept a list of addresses where specialities might be obtained. Treating Paris like Robinson Crusoe treated his island, she would, from time to time, start out on a foraging expedition to the most remote quarters of the capital, going to some particular shop for her coffee and to another for her pâtes d'Italie. She knew the exact date on which a certain man received his consignment of Bologna sausages, and when another got his Spanish olives in.
The slightest incidents of these excursions were magnified by her into events. Sometimes she would go on foot, and then her comments on the improvements she had noticed, on the increase in the traffic, and on the superiority of the air in the Rue de Bagneux were inexhaustible. At other times she would go by omnibus, and then her fellow-passengers formed the subject of her remarks. She had met a very nice woman who was very fat, or a young man who was very impertinent; the conductor had recognised her and said good morning; the 'bus had nearly been upset three times; an old gentleman—'decorated'—had had some trouble in alighting. 'I really thought he would fall, poor, dear old man!'
The insignificant and superfluous details upon which it pleased the poor woman's simple mind to dilate generally amused René, for the bourgeoise sometimes hit upon some curious figures of speech in her flow of words. She would say, for instance, when speaking of a fellow-passenger who was paying attentions to a cook laden with provisions, 'Some people like their pockets greasy,' or of two persons quarrelling, 'They fought like Darnajats'—a mysterious expression which she had always refused to translate.
But that evening there was too pronounced a contrast between the state of romantic excitement into which his interview with Suzanne had thrown the poet and the meanness of the surroundings in which he had been born. He did not stop to think that similar contrasts are to be found in every form of life, and that the substrata of the fashionable world are composed of mean rivalries, of disgusting attempts to keep up illusory appearances, and of compromises of conscience compared with which the narrow-mindedness of the middle classes is a proof of the most delightful simplicity.
He looked at Rosalie, and the resemblance between the girl and her mother struck him most forcibly. She was pretty, for all that. Her oval face, pale with evident grief, had an ivory tint as she bent down over her knitting in the lamp-light, and when she raised her eyes to his the sincerity of the passion that animated her shone forth from beneath her long lashes. But why were her eyes of precisely the same shade of colour as her mother's? Why, with twenty-four years between them, had they the same shape of brow, the same cut of the chin, and the same lines of the mouth? But how unjust to blame this innocent child for that resemblance, for that pallor, for that grief, and even for the silence in which she wrapped herself! Alas! that it should be so, but when we have wronged a woman it is easy enough to find an inexhaustible source of unjust complaints against her.