Chapter 1 - Page 2

to care
for individuals; she cared only for types, for categories. Her large
observation had made her acquainted with a great number, and her mind
was a complete collection of "heads." She flattered herself that she
knew at a glance where to pigeon-hole a new-comer, and if she made
any mistakes her deportment never betrayed them. I think that, as
regards individuals, she had neither likes nor dislikes; but she was
capable of expressing esteem or contempt for a species. She had her
own ways, I suppose, of manifesting her approval, but her manner of
indicating the reverse was simple and unvarying. "Je trouve que
c'est deplace"--this exhausted her view of the matter. 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. "When people come
chez moi, it is not to cut a figure in the world; I have never had
that illusion," I remember hearing her say; "and when you pay seven
francs a day, tout compris, it comprises everything but the right to
look down upon the others. But there are people who, the less they
pay, the more they take themselves au serieux. 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. If on your exits and
entrances you peeped into the kitchen, it made very little
difference; for Celestine, the cook, had no pretension to be an
invisible functionary or to deal in occult methods. She was always
at your service, with a grateful grin she blacked your boots; she
trudged off to fetch a cab; she would have carried your baggage, if
you had allowed her, on her broad little back. She was always
tramping in and out, between her kitchen and the fountain in the
place, where it often seemed to me that a large part of the
preparation for our dinner went forward--the wringing out of towels
and table-cloths, the washing of potatoes and cabbages, the scouring
of saucepans and cleansing of water--bottles. You enjoyed, from the
doorstep, a perpetual back-view of Celestine and of her large, loose,
woollen ankles, as she craned, from the waist, over into the fountain
and dabbled in her various utensils. This sounds as if life went on
in a very make-shift fashion at the Pension Beaurepas--as if the tone
of the establishment were sordid. But such was not at all the case.
We were simply very bourgeois; we