The Pension Beaurepas | Page 3

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This etext was scanned by David Price, email [email protected]
from the 1886 Macmillan and Co. edition. Proofing was by Emma Hair,
Francine Smith and Matthew Garrish.

The Pension Beaurepas
by Henry James

CHAPTER I.

I was not rich--on the contrary; and I had been told the Pension
Beaurepas was cheap. I had, moreover, been told that a boarding- house
is a capital place for the study of human nature. I had a fancy for a
literary career, and a friend of mine had said to me, "If you mean to
write you ought to go and live in a boarding-house; there is no other
such place to pick up material." I had read something of this kind in a
letter addressed by Stendhal to his sister: "I have a passionate desire to
know human nature, and have a great mind to live in a boarding-house,
where people cannot conceal their real characters." I was an admirer of
La Chartreuse de Parme, and it appeared to me that one could not do
better than follow in the footsteps of its author. I remembered, too, the
magnificent boarding-house in Balzac's Pere Goriot,--the "pension
bourgeoise des deux sexes et autres," kept by Madame Vauquer, nee
De Conflans. Magnificent, I mean, as a piece of portraiture; the
establishment, as an establishment, was certainly sordid enough, and I
hoped for better things from the Pension Beaurepas. This institution
was one of the most esteemed in Geneva, and, standing in a little

garden of its own, not far from the lake, had a very homely,
comfortable, sociable aspect. The regular entrance was, as one might
say, at the back, which looked upon the street, or rather upon a little
place, adorned like every place in Geneva, great or small, with a
fountain. This fact was not prepossessing, for on crossing the threshold
you found yourself more or less in the kitchen, encompassed with
culinary odours. This, however, was no great matter, for at the Pension
Beaurepas there was no attempt at gentility or at concealment of the
domestic machinery. The latter was of a very simple sort. Madame
Beaurepas was an excellent little old woman--she was very far
advanced in life, and had been keeping a pension for forty years--
whose only faults were that she was slightly deaf, that she was fond of
a surreptitious pinch of snuff, and that, at the age