Meanwhile it was the morning duty of the sour femme de confiance to summon the shattered remains of humanity, which she called master, to breakfast. But let it not be inferred from the squalid nature of his personal costume that the board of Monsieur Georges was spread penuriously: his outward man regarded the gratification of others; his inward regarded his own. The colour of his dressing-gown tended not a jot to his selfish enjoyment; but the amber coffee and smoking cream, the spongy bread and présalé butter, the slices of hard saucisson d'Arles and tender côtelettes à la minute in their silver réchaud, regarded exclusively his own five senses. It was to ensure to his daily use these sweeteners of human existence that the chevalier d'industrie toiled in his loathsome calling from eight o'clock to two per night; it was to ensure them hot and hot, and upon the most moderate terms, that he bore with the angular and acid female who presided over his domestic arrangements the remaining eighteen hours of the twenty-four. A younger and fairer femme de ménage would have exacted a nicer toilet, and the daintiest half of the dainties wherewith it was her duty to provide his table. But the chissie not only calculated the weight of provisions to be consumed to the thirty-second fraction of an ounce, but was content to eat the drumsticks of the chickens, the wings of the woodcocks, as well as to support the unsightly spectacle of his bald head and nauseous costume.
"Of what were you disputing last night with the old witch, Madame Grégoire, when I passed the porter's lodge?" demanded Monsieur Georges of the perpendicular shrew seated opposite to him, as he swallowed to his own share the twentieth of the two dozen oysters of Murênes provided for their breakfast.
"I only stepped in to pay her the twenty francs for Guguste's monthly board."
"But what was there in that to beget a squabble?" demanded the toothless man, in the mumbling chuckle which nothing but long custom enabled his housekeeper to understand. "Had she a complaint to make against the lad?"
"No one has complaints to make of him but you," said Ma'mselle Berthe, (forgetting her own venomous impeachment concerning the coffee and cream.) "We disputed because Madame Grégoire, like an ill-conditioned woman as she is, presumed to insult me."
"And what then?—you can make her étrennes pay for it."
"You can: but what compensation will it be to me that you diminish her New-year's gift from twenty francs to ten? She had the impudence to ask me to have an eye to the people on the third-floor! As if I was paid to do the spy-work of the propriétaire!"
"And who are the people on the third-floor?" demanded Monsieur Georges, who knew and cared very little for the proceedings of any house save the one under government licence in the Rue de Richelieu, amid the blaze of whose Corcel lamps, and glare of whose gilded cornices, he had the honour nightly to assist in fleecing the disloyal subjects of Louis Philippe and the greenhorn foreign visitors to his realms.
"How should I know?"
"Because Madame Grégoire, doubtless, informed you."