The Pension Beaurepas | Page 4

of seventy- three, she
wore flowers in her cap. There was a tradition in the house that she was
not so deaf as she pretended; that she feigned this infirmity in order to
possess herself of the secrets of her lodgers. But I never subscribed to
this theory; I am convinced that Madame Beaurepas had outlived the
period of indiscreet curiosity. She was a philosopher, on a
matter-of-fact basis; she had been having lodgers for forty years, and
all that she asked of them was that they should pay their bills, make use
of the door-mat, and fold their napkins. She cared very little for their
secrets. "J'en ai vus de toutes les couleurs," she said to me. She had
quite ceased to care for individuals; she cared only for types, for
categories. Her large observation had made her acquainted with a great
number, and her mind was a complete collection of "heads." She
flattered herself that she knew at a glance where to pigeon-hole a
new-comer, and if she made any mistakes her deportment never
betrayed them. I think that, as regards individuals, she had neither likes
nor dislikes; but she was capable of expressing esteem or contempt for
a species. She had her own ways, I suppose, of manifesting her
approval, but her manner of indicating the reverse was simple and
unvarying. "Je trouve que c'est deplace"--this exhausted her view of the
matter. If one of her inmates had put arsenic into the pot-au-feu, I
believe Madame Beaurepas would have contented herself with
remarking that the proceeding was out of place. The line of misconduct
to which she most objected was an undue assumption of gentility; she
had no patience with boarders who gave themselves airs. "When people

come chez moi, it is not to cut a figure in the world; I have never had
that illusion," I remember hearing her say; "and when you pay seven
francs a day, tout compris, it comprises everything but the right to look
down upon the others. But there are people who, the less they pay, the
more they take themselves au serieux. My most difficult boarders have
always been those who have had the little rooms."
Madame Beaurepas had a niece, a young woman of some forty odd
years; and the two ladies, with the assistance of a couple of
thick-waisted, red-armed peasant women, kept the house going. If on
your exits and entrances you peeped into the kitchen, it made very little
difference; for Celestine, the cook, had no pretension to be an invisible
functionary or to deal in occult methods. She was always at your
service, with a grateful grin she blacked your boots; she trudged off to
fetch a cab; she would have carried your baggage, if you had allowed
her, on her broad little back. She was always tramping in and out,
between her kitchen and the fountain in the place, where it often
seemed to me that a large part of the preparation for our dinner went
forward--the wringing out of towels and table-cloths, the washing of
potatoes and cabbages, the scouring of saucepans and cleansing of
water--bottles. You enjoyed, from the doorstep, a perpetual back-view
of Celestine and of her large, loose, woollen ankles, as she craned, from
the waist, over into the fountain and dabbled in her various utensils.
This sounds as if life went on in a very make-shift fashion at the
Pension Beaurepas--as if the tone of the establishment were sordid. But
such was not at all the case. We were simply very bourgeois; we
practised the good old Genevese principle of not sacrificing to
appearances. This is an excellent principle--when you have the reality.
We had the reality at the Pension Beaurepas: we had it in the shape of
soft short beds, equipped with fluffy duvets; of admirable coffee,
served to us in the morning by Celestine in person, as we lay recumbent
on these downy couches; of copious, wholesome, succulent dinners,
conformable to the best provincial traditions. For myself, I thought the
Pension Beaurepas picturesque, and this, with me, at that time was a
great word. I was young and ingenuous: I had just come from America.
I wished to perfect myself in the French tongue, and I innocently
believed that it flourished by Lake Leman. I used to go to lectures at
the Academy, and come home with a violent appetite. I always enjoyed

my morning walk across the long bridge (there was only one, just there,
in those days) which spans the deep blue out-gush of the lake, and up
the dark steep streets of the old Calvinistic city. The garden faced this
way, toward the lake and the old town; and this was the pleasantest
approach to the house. There was a high wall, with a double gate