The Pension Beaurepas | Page 5

in the
middle, flanked by a couple of ancient massive posts; the big rusty
grille contained some old-fashioned iron-work. The garden was rather
mouldy and weedy, tangled and untended; but it contained a little
thin--flowing fountain, several green benches, a rickety little table of
the same complexion, and three orange-trees, in tubs, which were
deposited as effectively as possible in front of the windows of the
salon.

CHAPTER II.

As commonly happens in boarding-houses, the rustle of petticoats was,
at the Pension Beaurepas, the most familiar form of the human tread.
There was the usual allotment of economical widows and old maids,
and to maintain the balance of the sexes there were only an old
Frenchman and a young American. It hardly made the matter easier that
the old Frenchman came from Lausanne. He was a native of that
estimable town, but he had once spent six months in Paris, he had
tasted of the tree of knowledge; he had got beyond Lausanne, whose
resources he pronounced inadequate. Lausanne, as he said, "manquait
d'agrements." When obliged, for reasons which he never specified, to
bring his residence in Paris to a close, he had fallen back on Geneva; he
had broken his fall at the Pension Beaurepas. Geneva was, after all,
more like Paris, and at a Genevese boarding-house there was sure to be
plenty of Americans with whom one could talk about the French
metropolis. M. Pigeonneau was a little lean man, with a large narrow
nose, who sat a great deal in the garden, reading with the aid of a large
magnifying glass a volume from the cabinet de lecture.
One day, a fortnight after my arrival at the Pension Beaurepas, I came
back, rather earlier than usual from my academic session; it wanted half
an hour of the midday breakfast. I went into the salon with the design

of possessing myself of the day's Galignani before one of the little
English old maids should have removed it to her virginal bower--a
privilege to which Madame Beaurepas frequently alluded as one of the
attractions of the establishment. In the salon I found a new-comer, a tall
gentleman in a high black hat, whom I immediately recognised as a
compatriot. I had often seen him, or his equivalent, in the hotel parlours
of my native land. He apparently supposed himself to be at the present
moment in a hotel parlour; his hat was on his head, or, rather, half off
it--pushed back from his forehead, and rather suspended than poised.
He stood before a table on which old newspapers were scattered, one of
which he had taken up and, with his eye-glass on his nose, was holding
out at arm's-length. It was that honourable but extremely diminutive
sheet, the Journal de Geneve, a newspaper of about the size of a
pocket-handkerchief. As I drew near, looking for my Galignani, the tall
gentleman gave me, over the top of his eye-glass, a somewhat solemn
stare. Presently, however, before I had time to lay my hand on the
object of my search, he silently offered me the Journal de Geneve.
"It appears," he said, "to be the paper of the country."
"Yes," I answered, "I believe it's the best."
He gazed at it again, still holding it at arm's-length, as if it had been a
looking-glass. "Well," he said, "I suppose it's natural a small country
should have small papers. You could wrap it up, mountains and all, in
one of our dailies!"
I found my Galignani, and went off with it into the garden, where I
seated myself on a bench in the shade. Presently I saw the tall
gentleman in the hat appear in one of the open windows of the salon,
and stand there with his hands in his pockets and his legs a little apart.
He looked very much bored, and--I don't know why--I immediately
began to feel sorry for him. He was not at all a picturesque personage;
he looked like a jaded, faded man of business. But after a little he came
into the garden and began to stroll about; and then his restless,
unoccupied carriage, and the vague, unacquainted manner in which his
eyes wandered over the place, seemed to make it proper that, as an
older resident, I should exercise a certain hospitality. I said something
to him, and he came and sat down beside me on my bench, clasping
one of his long knees in his hands.
"When is it this big breakfast of theirs comes off?" he inquired. "That's

what I call it--the little breakfast and the big breakfast. I never thought I
should live to see the time when I should care to eat two breakfasts. But
a man's glad to do anything over here."
"For myself," I observed, "I find