The Cockaynes in Paris | Page 3

French cultivate--and which may be hollow, but is pleasant, and oils the wheels of life.
[Illustration: ROBINSON CRUSOE AND FRIDAY.
From French designs.]
Mrs. Rowe's was in the Rue--say the Rue Millevoye, so that we may not interfere with possible vested interests. Was it respectable? Was it genteel? Did good country families frequent it? Were all the comforts of an English home to be had? Had Mrs. Grundy cast an approving eye into every nook and corner? Of course there were Bibles in the bedrooms; and you were not made to pay a franc for every cake of soap. Mrs. Rowe had her tea direct from Twinings'. Twinings' tea she had drunk through her better time, when Rowe had one of the finest houses in all Shepherd's Bush, and come what might, Twinings' tea she would drink while she was permitted to drink tea at all. Brown Windsor--no other soap for Mrs. Rowe, if you please. People who wanted any of the fanciful soaps of Rimmel or Piver must buy them. Brown Windsor was all she kept. Yes, she was obliged to have Gruyère--and people did ask occasionally for Roquefort; but her opinion was that the person who did not prefer a good Cheshire to any other cheese, deserved to go without any. She had been twenty-one years in Paris, and seven times only had she missed morning service on Sundays. Hereupon, a particular history of each occasion, and the superhuman difficulty which had bound Mrs. Rowe hand and foot to the Rue Millevoye from eleven till one. She had a faithful note of a beautiful sermon preached in the year 1850 by the Rev. John Bobbin, in which he compared life to a boarding-house. He was staying with Mrs. Howe at the time. He was an earnest worker in the true way; and she distinctly saw her salle-à-manger in his eye, when he enlarged on the bounteous table spread by Nature, and the little that was needed from man to secure all its blessings.
[Illustration: PAPA & THE DEAR BOYS.]
Mrs. Rowe took a maternal interest in me. I had made an economical arrangement by which I secured a little room to myself throughout the year, under the slates. I had many friends. I constantly arrived, bringing new lodgers in my wake. For the house was quiet, well-ordered, cheap, and tremendously respectable. I say, Mrs. Rowe took a maternal interest in me--that is, she said so. There were ill-natured people who had another description for her solicitude; but she had brought herself to believe that she had an unselfish regard for your humble servant, and that she was necessary to my comfort in the world, and I was pleased at the innocent humbug. It afforded me excellent creature comforts; and I was indebted to it for a constant welcome when I got to Paris--which is something to the traveller. We cling to an old hotel, after we have found the service bad, the cooking execrable, and the rooms dirty. It is an ancient house, and the people know us, and have a cheery word and a home look.
[Illustration: THE DOWAGER AND TALL FOOTMAN.]
Many years were passed in the Rue Millevoye by Mrs. Rowe and her niece, without more incident than the packing and unpacking of luggage, and genteel disputes over items in the bills conducted with icy politeness on both sides, and concluded by Mrs. Rowe invariably with the withering observation, that it was the first remark of the kind which had ever been made on one of her little notes. People usually came to a settlement with complimentary expressions of surprise at the extreme--almost reckless--moderation of her charges; and expressed themselves as at a loss to understand how she could make it worth her while to do so very much for so very little. The people who came and went were alike in the mass. The reader is requested to bear in mind that Mrs. Rowe had a connexion of her own. She was seldom angry; but when an advertising agent made his way to her business parlour, and took the liberty of submitting the value of a Western States paper as a medium for making her establishment known, she confessed that the impertinence was too much for her temper. Mrs. Rowe advertise! Mrs. Rowe would just as soon throw herself off the Pont Neuf, or--miss church next Sunday.
"They don't come a second time!" Mrs. Rowe would say to me, with a fierce compression of the lip, that might lead a nervous person to imagine she made away with them in the cellars.
When Mrs. Rowe took you into her confidence--a slow and tedious admission--she was pleased, usually, to fortify your stock of knowledge with a comprehensive view of her family connexions; intended to set the Whytes of Battersea (from whom she derived, before