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By Root 1313 0

brought home his full salary of eighteen hundred francs a year, he meekly offered to give her a regular sum, which her husband was not to know about. But she turned down the offer, paradoxically insisting that the fifty francs was enough. Yet during the month, she would regularly write to Florent, calling him their “savior.” In her small, fine handwriting, she would manage to fill three pages with meek pleas for the loan of ten francs, and she did this often enough that most of Florent's hundred and fifty francs made its way to Verlaque. Her husband doubtless knew nothing of this, though the wife kissed Florent's hands. But this charity gave Florent great pleasure, and he concealed it as though it were a prohibited act of self-indulgence.

“That Verlaque is making a fool of you,” Gavard sometimes said. “He's living easy now that you are paying all the bills.”

Finally one day Florent said, “We've worked it out. I'm only giving him twenty-five francs from now on.”

After all, Florent didn't have any needs. He got his room and board free from the Quenus. He needed only a few francs so that he could go to Monsieur Lebigre's some evenings. Little by little his life became set like a clock. He worked in his room, continued his lessons with Muche twice a week between eight and nine o'clock, left one night free for Beautiful Lisa so as not to anger her, and passed the rest of his time in the glass-paneled room with Gavard and his friends.

When he went to the Méhudins', he kept a professorial distance. He liked the old house on rue Pirouette. On the ground floor he passed the bland odors of the cooked-vegetable seller. Large pans of spinach and sorrel were cooling in the little backyard. Then he climbed a dark, greasy staircase with worn, warped steps twisted at frightening angles. The Méhudins occupied the entire second floor. Even after they could afford it, the mother always refused to move, despite the pleas of her daughters, who dreamed of life in a new house on a wide, handsome street. The old woman could not be moved on this issue. She said that she had lived there and intended to die there. Besides, she was perfectly happy in her dark closet, leaving the more spacious bedrooms for Claire and the Beautiful Norman. The Norman, by right of being the older, had taken the room with a street view, the largest and best. Claire, annoyed by this, refused to take the adjoining room overlooking the yard and instead insisted on staying across the landing in little more than a garret, which she did not even have whitewashed. She maintained her independence by having a separate key, and whenever she was displeased she could lock herself in her room.

Florent generally arrived just as the Méhudins were finishing dinner. Muche would leap on him, and Florent would take a seat while the boy was still clinging to him and chattering away. Once the oilcloth table covering had been cleaned, they began the lesson at a corner of the table. The Beautiful Norman welcomed him. She would knit or mend linen, seated at the table working by the same light as the lesson, and she would often stop working to listen to it, as she found it intriguing. She soon began to feel a warm appreciation for this clever man, who could speak to her child with the gentleness of a woman and showed the patience of an angel in repeating the same material over and over again. She no longer considered him unattractive and even felt a little jealous of Beautiful Lisa. She would pull her chair even closer and study Florent with an embarrassing smile.

“Mama, you're bumping my elbow and I can't write,” Muche would say irritably. “There's the blot you made me do. Can't you move back?”

More and more, the Beautiful Norman said mean things about Beautiful Lisa. She claimed that she lied about her age, that she laced her corset so tight that she couldn't breathe, that if she appeared in the morning so perfectly put together without a hair out of place, it must be because she looked horrendous before she got dressed. Then the Norman would raise her arms to show that she was not wearing