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But I should have gone quite wrong; Madame Beaurepas had no fault at all to find with her new pensionnaires. "I have no observation whatever to make about them," she said to me one evening. "I see nothing in those ladies which is at all deplace. They don't complain of anything; they don't meddle; they take what's given them; they leave me tranquil. The Americans are often like that.
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.
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."
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 of seventy- three, she wore flowers in her cap.
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.
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.
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.
She is less submissive to her mother than she has to pretend to be. That's in self-defence; it's to make her life possible." "She wishes to get away from her mother," continued Madame Beaurepas. "She wishes to courir les champs." "She wishes to go to America, her native country." "Precisely. And she will certainly go." "I hope so!" I rejoined.
"You needn't pity her too much; she's a sly thing." "Ah, for that, no!" I exclaimed. "She's a charming girl." Madame Beaurepas gave an elderly grin. "She has hooked you, eh? But the mother won't have you." I developed my idea, without heeding this insinuation. "She's a charming girl, but she is a little odd. It's a necessity of her position.
Often, but not always," Madame Beaurepas pursued. "We are to have a specimen to-morrow of a very different sort." "An American?" I inquired. "Two Americaines a mother and a daughter. There are Americans and Americans: when you are difficiles, you are more so than any one, and when you have pretensions ah, per exemple, it's serious.
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