"Eh, I see! It is an English word, and you do not understand it. It means lame."
By which I discovered that had she spoken our transatlantic patois she would have said "blades."
Every one of our Relicts had her private sitting-room attached to her bed-room, the house having been built expressly to suit the demands of bourgeois widows with fortunes. Thus our salon was of very little account until after dinner, when our widows, instead of returning to their own rooms, the garden, or the boulevard, where they spent the day, herded together around card-tables almost as closely as sheep in a pen. The salon was not intended for daytime use; in the bitterest weather it had no fire until evening, and it had but a single window, which looked out upon the pavement of a well-like court arched over, three stories above, by a handkerchief bit of sky. Very little light or air ever entered the box-like place; during the day its atmosphere was stale and heavy, at night almost fetid. Whenever we ventured to pass an hour there our struggle was always against fate. Slyly we would leave the one door an inch ajar, or surreptitiously unclose the window a fraction as much. Scarcely, however, had we begun to congratulate ourselves upon success when half a score of antique roses flaunted and flared, and the death-knell of sly hopes sounded with echoed and re-echoed cry: "Mon Dieu! I smell air!" "Mon Dieu! Smell you not air?" "Mon Dieu! Smell we not air?" "Mon Dieu! Smells she not air?" "Mon Dieu! Smell they not air?"
Almost all our veuves had children and grandchildren in Paris, and we were continually surprised to see the mundane elegance of these younger branches of our withered old trees. It showed the usual history, however, of bourgeois parents who had worked steadily, lived humbly and economically, to gather dots for their daughters and open careers for their sons, to see them thus rise to positions in life far above their parents. Every day some of these younger branches came to our house in handsome carriages and toilets; and indeed on some days the number of elegant visitors who rang at our door gave the impression of a gay reception à la mode rather than of the ordinary visitors of a pension bourgeoise at Saint-Maudé.
One of our Relicts was decidedly less bourgeoise and more paysanne than any of the rest. She was round as a ball, seventy years of age, and dressed always in short gray petticoats, black short-gown, and close white cap. Madame Boulanger kept close watch upon her, and tried to confine her to the sunny, high-walled garden set with a number of round little iron tables, where our Relicts took their after-déjeûner café on sunny days. But Madame Boulanger was not Argus-eyed, and thus we often saw Madame Leroy escape through the front door and roll like a huge balloon along the boulevard, bent on what she called "collecting her rents." The way she did it was to enter every open door and accost every grown person she saw with the stern reproach that he was behind-hand with his rent, and if he did not pay up by to-morrow she would send the huissier to sell him out. The poor creature was so well known in the neighborhood that she never received rough treatment, and was generally so thoroughly tired out by her rent-collecting as to be quite ready to return without resistance whenever one of our servants sought her. When she did not escape, and mingled with the conglomerate widowhood of the garden (she was never permitted in the salon, and went to bed with the chickens), her time was spent, hour after hour, day after day, month after month, going from Relict to Relict, telling always the same story,—always the same, and always a true one:
"Are you in trade? I am. My husband and I came to Paris from Normandy fifty years ago, on foot, with one hundred francs. We kept a green-grocery on Rue des Saints-Pères. When my husband died he left me one hundred thousand francs. I go to collect my rents: will you go? Are you in trade? I am. My husband and I came to Paris on foot," etc., etc., etc.
One of the most elegant of all our visitors was to this poor old Madame Leroy. She always came in an elegant landau, with liveried coachman and footman. Her toilets were of incomparable luxury, but likewise of restrained and cultured taste, being usually of black velvet, duchess-like laces, and queenly furs. She always went directly to this old peasant-woman's handsomely-furnished rooms, and we never saw her except as she descended from her carriage before the windows at which we sat. She was a tall, finely-formed, aristocratic-looking brunette of thirty-five or forty, artistically gotten up as to complexion and hair, and always smiling affectionately at the tea-kettle old figure waiting at the door to greet her. This aristocratic lady was known in the house as Madame la Princesse, and was the daughter of our ancient paysanne and green-grocer, whom a Slav noble had taken from a café chantant in Constantinople to endow with his name and fortune.
Another of our veuves filled her private salon with cats. There were seven of them, and the odor of her premises was ancient and cat-like. Three of these cats were sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything, and had lived with their mistress in these very rooms years before, when booming shells sped hot over the house, and fell sometimes close beside it, during the siege of Paris.
"How did you manage to feed them?" we asked.
"I bought slices of cat in the market and stewed them in wine," answered Madame Pognon. "Wine and rice were the only things we were not stinted in. Thus I could always make a ragout for Pierre, Jean, and Jacques, and they throve on it. But I had to keep them shut up, or they would have made ragouts instead of eaten them."