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Updated: June 12, 2025
"I have kept this hotel for twenty years, I have grown grey in the service of artists and students, and this is the first time one has demanded dinner for one franc fifty!" "She has grown grey!" contemptuously muttered Madame Valière. "Grey? She!" repeated Madame Dépine, with no less bitterness. "It is only to give herself the air of a grande dame!"
She had insisted, of course, that the savings for the second wig were not to commence till the return, so that Madame Valière might carry with her a present worthy of her position and her port. They had anxious consultations over this present.
As they sat at their joyous breakfast the next morning, ere starting for the hairdresser's, the casement open to the October sunshine, Jacques brought up a letter for Madame Valière an infrequent incident. Both old women paled with instinctive distrust of life. And as the "Princess" read her letter, all the sympathetic happiness died out of her face.
Madame Dépine left the bureau and wandered about in a daze. That monster of ingratitude! That arch-adventuress, more vicious even than her bejewelled sister! All the long months of more than Lenten rigour recurred to her self-pitiful mood, that futile half-year of semi-starvation. How Madame Valière must have gorged on the sly, the rich eccentric!
"I congratulate you," said Madame Valière, after the steam-tram had become a far-away rumble. "Before next summer we shall have yours too," the winner reminded her consolingly. They had not waited till the hundred francs were actually in the stocking. The last few would accumulate while the wig was making.
Madame Dépine would don her ponderous gold brooch, sole salvage of her bourgeois prosperity; while, if the visitor were for Madame Valière, that grande dame would hang from her yellow, shrivelled neck the long gold chain and the old-fashioned watch, whose hands still seemed to point to regal hours.
Their only consolation had been that neither outdid the other, and so long as each saw the other's brown wig, they had refrained from facing the dread possibility of having to sell off their jewellery in a desperate effort of emulation. Gradually Madame Dépine had grown to wear her wig with vindictive endurance, and Madame Valière to wear hers with gentle resignation.
"It is not this one?" she said dubiously. "Mais, oui." Madame Dépine was nodding, a great smile transfiguring the emaciated orb of her face. The artist's eyes twinkled. "But this will not fit you," Madame Valière gasped. "It is a little error, I know," replied Madame Dépine. "But it is a great error," cried Madame Valière, aghast. And her angry gaze transfixed the coiffeur.
Both wore diamond rosettes in their hair and ropes of pearls round their necks. The old ladies' eyes met, then turned away. "It is an idea!" agreed Madame Valière. "The day will come when one's nieces will be married." "But scarcely when New Year's Day shall cease to be," the "Princess" sighed. "Still, one might win in the lottery!" "Ah! true. Let us enter, then." "One will be enough. You go."
"But I have lived so long in Russia, I forget people call this cold." "Ah! the Princess travelled far?" said Madame Dépine, eagerly. "Too far," replied Madame Valière, with a flash of Gallic wit. "But who has told you of the Princess?" "Madame la Propriétaire, naturally." "She talks too much she and her wig!" "If only she didn't imagine herself a powdered marquise in it!
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