“Madame Gruget, at your service. I have drawed my dividends in my day, my little gentleman,” said she to Bixiou, whose covert smile offended her. “If my pore girl hadn’t been so unlucky as to be too fond of a man, I shouldn’t look so as you see me. She made a hole in the water, saving your presence, my pore Ida. And then I was fool enough to go in for lottery tickets, four numbers, and sticking to them, and that is why at seventy years old, my good monsieur, I am sick-nurse at ten sous a day and my food—”
“But not your clothes,” said Bixiou. “My grandmother dressed herself, besides keeping up a snug little ternion.”
“But out of my ten sous I have to pay for a furnished room …”
“And what has she got—this lady you are nursing?”
“She has got nothing, monsieur, by way of money I mean; for she has got some complaint that frightens the doctors.—She owes me sixty days’ pay, and that is why I stay with her. Her husband, who is a Count—for she is a Countess—will pay the bill, no doubt, when she is dead, and counting on that, I have lent her all I had … But I have nothing left, and I have put everything up the spout. She owes me forty-seven francs and twelve sous, besides the thirty francs wages, and as she wants to choke herself off with charcoal: ‘That is not right,’ says I—more by token I told the woman in the lodge to keep an eye on her while I was out, for she is capable of throwing herself out of window.”
“But what is the matter with her?” said Joseph.
“Well, sir, the doctor came from the Sisters; but as to what is the matter,” said Madame Gruget, with a prudish air—“he said she must go to the hospital—and she wouldn’t get over it.”
“We will go and see about it,” said Bixiou.
“Here,” said Joseph, “here are ten francs.”
After putting his hand into the famous death’s-head and taking out all his change, the painter walked to the Rue Mazarine, where he took a hackney cab and went off to Bianchon, whom he fortunately found at home, while Bixiou set out for the Rue de Bussy to fetch their friend Desroches. The four friends met an hour after in the Rue du Houssay.
“That Mephistopheles on horseback called Philippe Bridau,” said Bixiou to his three friends as they climbed the stairs, “has steered his bark in a cunning way to get rid of his wife. Our friend Lousteau, as you know, only too glad to get a thousand-franc note every month from Philippe, kept Madame Bridau in the company of Florine, Mariette, Tullia, and la Val-Noble. As soon as Philippe saw his Rabouilleuse accustomed to dress and expensive pleasures, he gave her no more money, but left her to make it—you may imagine how. Thus by the end of eighteen months Philippe left his wife to sink a little lower, from quarter to quarter; and at last, by the help of a splendid young subaltern, he suggested to her a taste for dram-drinking. As he rose his wife sank, and the Countess is now in the kennel. The woman born in the fields is hard to kill; I do not know how Philippe set to work to get rid of her. I am curious to study this little drama, for I owe the fellow a revenge. Alas! my friends,” Bixiou went on, in a tone that left his three companions doubtful whether he spoke in joke or in earnest, “to get rid of a man you have only to inoculate him with a vice.
“ ‘She loved balls too well and that was her death,’ said Victor Hugo. There you are. My grandmother loved lottery gambling; Père Rouget loved a petticoat, and Lolotte was the death of him! Madame Bridau, poor creature, loved Philippe, and by Philippe she has perished. Oh, Vice! Vice!—My friends, do you know what vice is? It is the Bonneau of death.”
“Then you will die of a jest!” said Desroches, smiling at Bixiou.
Above the fourth floor the young men mounted one of those upright stairways like ladders which lead up to the attics of many houses in Paris. Though Joseph, who had seen Flore so handsome, was prepared for a dreadful contrast, he could not conceive of the hideous spectacle that presented itself to his artistic gaze. Under the sharp slope of a garret, with no paper on the walls, and on a camp-bed with a meagre mattress stuffed perhaps with flock, the three men saw a woman as green as a body two days drowned, and as emaciated as a consumptive patient within two hours of death. This malodorous carcass wore a common checked handkerchief bound round a head bereft of hair. The caverns of her hollow eyes were red, and the lids like the skin that lines an eggshell. As to the form that had once been so beautiful, it was a squalid skeleton.
On seeing her visitors, Flore drew across her bosom a rag of muslin that had probably been a window-blind, for it was edged with rust from the iron rod. The furniture consisted of two chairs, a wretched chest of drawers, on which a tallow candle was set in a potato, some dishes strewn on the floor, and an earthen fire-pot in the corner of an otherwise empty hearth. Bixiou saw the remains of the half-quire of paper purchased at the grocer’s for the letter which the two women had no doubt concocted between them. The word loathsome is but a positive degree for which there is no superlative to express the effect produced by this abject scene.
When the dying woman saw Joseph, two large tears fell down her cheeks.
“She can still weep,” said Bixiou. “A strange sight indeed—tears flowing from a bag of dominoes. It
