Chapter 1

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." I had read something of
this kind in a letter addressed by Stendhal to his sister: "I have a
passionate desire to know human nature, and have a great mind to live
in a boarding-house, where people cannot conceal their real
characters." I was an admirer of La Chartreuse de Parme, and it
appeared to me that one could not do better than follow in the
footsteps of its author. I remembered, too, the magnificent
boarding-house in Balzac's Pere Goriot,--the "pension bourgeoise des
deux sexes et autres," kept by Madame Vauquer, nee De Conflans.
Magnificent, I mean, as a piece of portraiture; the establishment, as
an establishment, was certainly sordid enough, and I hoped for better
things from the Pension Beaurepas. This institution was one of the
most esteemed in Geneva, and, standing in a little garden of its own,
not far from the lake, had a very homely, comfortable, sociable
aspect. The regular entrance was, as one might say, at the back,
which looked upon the street, or rather upon a little place, adorned
like every place in Geneva, great or small, with a fountain. 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. 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. There was a tradition in the
house that she was not so deaf as she pretended; that she feigned
this infirmity in order to possess herself of the secrets of her
lodgers. But I never subscribed to this theory; I am convinced that
Madame Beaurepas had outlived the period of indiscreet curiosity.
She was a philosopher, on a matter-of-fact basis; she had been having
lodgers for forty years, and all that she asked of them was that they
should pay their bills, make use of the door-mat, and fold their
napkins. She cared very little for their secrets. "J'en ai vus de
toutes les couleurs," she said to me. She had quite ceased