The Purse | Page 8

log of fire-brick, as carefully buried as a miser's treasure could
ever be. An old Aubusson carpet, very much faded, very much mended,
and as worn as a pensioner's coat, did not cover the whole of the tiled
floor, and the cold struck to his feet. The walls were hung with a
reddish paper, imitating figured silk with a yellow pattern. In the
middle of the wall opposite the windows the painter saw a crack, and
the outline marked on the paper of double-doors, shutting off a recess
where Madame Leseigneur slept no doubt, a fact ill disguised by a sofa
in front of the door. Facing the chimney, above a mahogany chest of

drawers of handsome and tasteful design, was the portrait of an officer
of rank, which the dim light did not allow him to see well; but from
what he could make out he thought that the fearful daub must have
been painted in China. The window-curtains of red silk were as much
faded as the furniture, in red and yellow worsted work, [as] if this room
"contrived a double debt to pay." On the marble top of the chest of
drawers was a costly malachite tray, with a dozen coffee cups
magnificently painted and made, no doubt, at Sevres. On the chimney
shelf stood the omnipresent Empire clock: a warrior driving the four
horses of a chariot, whose wheel bore the numbers of the hours on its
spokes. The tapers in the tall candlesticks were yellow with smoke, and
at each corner of the shelf stood a porcelain vase crowned with
artificial flowers full of dust and stuck into moss.
In the middle of the room Hippolyte remarked a card-table ready for
play, with new packs of cards. For an observer there was something
heartrending in the sight of this misery painted up like an old woman
who wants to falsify her face. At such a sight every man of sense must
at once have stated to himself this obvious dilemma--either these two
women are honesty itself, or they live by intrigue and gambling. But on
looking at Adelaide, a man so pure-minded as Schinner could not but
believe in her perfect innocence, and ascribe the incoherence of the
furniture to honorable causes.
"My dear," said the old lady to the young one, "I am cold; make a little
fire, and give me my shawl."
Adelaide went into a room next the drawing-room, where she no doubt
slept, and returned bringing her mother a cashmere shawl, which when
new must have been very costly; the pattern was Indian; but it was old,
faded and full of darns, and matched the furniture. Madame Leseigneur
wrapped herself in it very artistically, and with the readiness of an old
woman who wishes to make her words seem truth. The young girl ran
lightly off to the lumber-room and reappeared with a bundle of small
wood, which she gallantly threw on the fire to revive it.
It would be rather difficult to reproduce the conversation which
followed among these three persons. Hippolyte, guided by the tact
which is almost always the outcome of misfortune suffered in early
youth, dared not allow himself to make the least remark as to his
neighbors' situation, as he saw all about him the signs of ill-disguised

poverty. The simplest question would have been an indiscretion, and
could only be ventured on by old friendship. The painter was
nevertheless absorbed in the thought of this concealed penury, it pained
his generous soul; but knowing how offensive every kind of pity may
be, even the friendliest, the disparity between his thoughts and his
words made him feel uncomfortable.
The two ladies at first talked of painting, for women easily guess the
secret embarrassment of a first call; they themselves feel it perhaps, and
the nature of their mind supplies them with a thousand devices to put
an end to it. By questioning the young man as to the material exercise
of his art, and as to his studies, Adelaide and her mother emboldened
him to talk. The indefinable nothings of their chat, animated by kind
feeling, naturally led Hippolyte to flash forth remarks or reflections
which showed the character of his habits and of his mind. Trouble had
prematurely faded the old lady's face, formerly handsome, no doubt;
nothing was left but the more prominent features, the outline, in a word,
the skeleton of a countenance of which the whole effect indicated great
shrewdness with much grace in the play of the eyes, in which could be
discerned the expression peculiar to women of the old Court; an
expression that cannot be defined in words. Those fine and mobile
features might quite as well indicate bad feelings, and suggest
astuteness and womanly artifice carried to a high pitch