"Perhaps, Messieurs et Mesdames, you think this an extravagance for people in our situation," says the voice, in feebly polite tones of apology; "but, alas! how could we resist it? It is so beautiful—it brightens the room so—it gives us such a noble appearance. And, then, it is also a property—something to leave to our children—in short, a pardonable extravagance. Aïe! I am shaking all over again; I can say no more!"
While these words are in course of utterance, the group of friends separate, and I see sitting behind them, close to the big stove, the little portress, looking sadly changed for the worse. Her tiny face has become very yellow; her bright brown eyes look disproportionately large; she has an old shawl twisted round her shoulders and shivers in it perpetually. I ask what is the matter, imagining that the poor little woman has got a fit of the ague. The portress contrives to smile as usual before she answers, though her teeth are chattering audibly.
"You will not give me drugs, if I tell you?" she says.
"I will do nothing that is not perfectly agreeable to you," I reply evasively.
"My complaint is a violent indigestion (une forte indigestion)," continues the portress, indicatively laying one trembling fore-finger on the region of her malady. "And I am curing myself with a Light Tea."
Here the fore-finger changes its direction and points to a large white earthenware teapot, with an empty mug by the side of it. To save the portress the trouble of replenishing her drinking vessel, I pour out a dose of the Light Tea. It is a liquid of a faint straw colour, totally unlike any English tea that ever was made; and it tastes as a quart of hot water might taste after a wisp of hay had been dipped into it. The portress swallows three mugsful of her medicine in my presence, smiling and shivering; looking rapturously at the magnificent new mirror with its attendant flower-pots and tapers; and rejecting with grimaces of comic disgust, all overtures of medical help on my part, even to the modest offering of one small pill. An hour or two later, I descend to the lodge again to see how she is. She has been persuaded to go to bed; is receiving, in bed, a levée of friends; is answering, in the same interesting situation, the questions of all the visitors of the day, relating to all the lodgers in the house; has begun a fresh potful of the light tea; is still smiling; still shivering; still contemptuously sceptical on the subject of drugs.
In the evening I go down again. The teapot is not done with yet, and the hay-flavoured hot water is still pouring inexhaustibly into the system of the little portress. She happens now to be issuing directions relative to the keeping awake of Hippolyte-senior, who, for this night at least, must watch by the gate-string. He is to have a pint of strong coffee and a pipe; he is to have the gas turned on very strong; and he is to be excited by the presence of a brisk and wakeful friend. The next morning, just as I am thinking of making inquiries at the lodge, who should enter my room but the dyspeptic patient herself, cured, and ready to digest anything but a doctor's advice or a small pill. Hippolyte-senior, I hear, has not fallen asleep over the gate-string for more than half-an-hour every now and then; and the portress has had a long night's rest. She does not consider this unusual occurrence as reckoning in any degree among the agencies which have accomplished her rapid recovery. It is the light tea alone that has done it; and, if I still doubt the inestimable virtues of the hot hay-water cure, then of all the prejudiced gentlemen the portress has ever heard of, I am the most deplorably obstinate in opening my arms to error and shutting my eyes to truth.
Such is the little domestic world about me, in some of the more vivid lights in which it presents itself to my own peculiar view.
As for the great Parisian world outside, my experience of it is bounded by the prospect I obtain of the Champs Elysées from my bed-room window. Fashionable Paris spins and prances by me every afternoon, in all its glory; but what interest have healthy princes and counts and blood-horses, and blooming ladies, plunged in abysses of circumambient crinoline, for me, in my sick situation? They all fly by me in one confused phantasmagoria of gay colours and rushing forms, which I look at with lazy eyes. The sights I watch with interest are those only which seem to refer in some degree to my own invalid position. My sick man's involuntary egotism clings as close to me when I look outward at the great highway, as when I look inward at my own little room. Thus, the only objects which I now notice attentively from my window, are, oddly enough, chiefly those which I should have missed altogether, or looked at with indifference if I had occupied my bachelor apartment in the enviable character of a healthy man.
For example, out of the various vehicles which pass me by dozens in the morning, and by hundreds in the afternoon, only two succeed in making anything like a lasting impression on my mind. I have only vague ideas of dust, dashing, and magnificence in connection with the rapid carriages late in the day—and of bells and hollow yelping of carters' voices in connection with the deliberate waggons early in the morning. But I have, on the other hand, a very distinct remembrance of one sober brown omnibus, belonging to a Sanitary Asylum, and of a queer little truck which carries baths and hot water to private houses, from a bathing establishment near me. The omnibus, as it passes my window at a solemn jog-trot, is full of patients getting their airing. I can see them dimly, and I fall into curious fancies about their various cases, and wonder what proportion of the afflicted passengers are near the time of emancipation from their sanitary prison on wheels. As for the little truck, with its empty zinc bath and barrel of warm water, I am probably wrong in sympathetically associating it as frequently as I do with cases of illness. It is doubtless often sent for by healthy people, too luxurious in their habits to walk abroad for a bath. But there must be a proportion of cases of illness to which the truck ministers; and when I see it going faster than usual, I assume that it must be wanted by some person in a fit; grow suddenly agitated by the idea; and watch the empty bath and the hot-water barrel with breathless interest, until they rumble away together out of sight.