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Updated: June 4, 2025
Her terms were low, and she treated her boarders de haute en bas. If they were not content with her viands, they might go and find more agreeable viands elsewhere. Madame Magnotte was altogether mysterious and inscrutable. Some people said that she was a countess, and that the wealth and lands of her family had been confiscated by the committee of public unsafety in '93.
The words, their mournful meaning, the faces of the friends amongst whom she had last sung them, the picture of the peaceful home whose walls had echoed the music, all these things arose before her in a vision too painfully vivid; and the lonely boarder at the Pension Magnotte covered her face with her hands, and sobbed aloud. The passion of tears lasted but a minute.
He haunted the dull salon, dim and dreary in the twilight; for Madame Magnotte was chary of lamps and candles, and prolonged to its utmost limits the pensive interval between day and night. He walked softly up and down the room, unheeded by the ladies clustered in a group by one of the windows. Restless and unhappy, he could neither go nor stay. She was not coming down to the salon this evening.
"Madame Meynell!" repeated Gustave, congratulating himself on finding that the Englishwoman was an inhabitant of the house he lived in. "She is a widow, I suppose?" "Yes, she is a widow. I asked that question, and she answered, yes. But she told me nothing of her late husband. She is not at all communicative." This was all Gustave could obtain from Madame Magnotte. She was not communicative.
To Madame Magnotte Gustave introduced the stranger. She gave just one look round the dreary saloon; but to Gustave's fancy that one look seemed eloquent. "Ah me!" it said; "is this the fairest home I am to find upon this inhospitable earth?"
A printer now occupied the lower chambers, and a hand painted on the wall pointed to the Pension Magnotte, au premier. Tirez le cordon, s.v.p. Gustave was twenty-one years of age when he came to Paris; tall, stalwart, broad of shoulders and deep of chest, with a fair frank face, an auburn moustache, candid, kind blue eyes a physiognomy rather Saxon than Celtic.
"It is the widow of Harpagon himself," Madame Magnotte told her gossips an old woman with two furiously ugly daughters, who for the last fifteen years had lived a nomadic life in divers boarding-houses, fondly clinging to the hope that, amongst so many strange bachelors, husbands for these two solitary ones must at last be found.
"It is a brave heart," Madame Magnotte said of him, "though for the breaking of glasses a scourge un fleau."
The consciousness of that strange pale face haunted and oppressed him. He hoped to have a few minutes' talk with the English lady after dinner, but she disappeared before the removal of those recondite preparations which in the Pension Magnotte went by the generic name of "dessert."
"She is a dear, good, industrious little thing," he said, "and works harder than I do. But she is no miracle of beauty; and her life is so dreary that I often wonder she does not go into a convent. It would be gayer and pleasanter for her than to live with those old women at the Pension Magnotte." "I suppose there are many beautiful women in Paris?" said Cydalise, bent upon knowing the worst.
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