Chapter 2

As commonly happens in boarding-houses, the rustle of petticoats was,
at the Pension Beaurepas, the most familiar form of the human tread.
There was the usual allotment of economical widows and old maids, and
to maintain the balance of the sexes there were only an old Frenchman
and a young American. It hardly made the matter easier that the old
Frenchman came from Lausanne. He was a native of that estimable
town, but he had once spent six months in Paris, he had tasted of the
tree of knowledge; he had got beyond Lausanne, whose resources he
pronounced inadequate. Lausanne, as he said, "manquait d'agrements."
When obliged, for reasons which he never specified, to bring his
residence in Paris to a close, he had fallen back on Geneva; he had
broken his fall at the Pension Beaurepas. Geneva was, after all,
more like Paris, and at a Genevese boarding-house there was sure to
be plenty of Americans with whom one could talk about the French
metropolis. M. Pigeonneau was a little lean man, with a large narrow
nose, who sat a great deal in the garden, reading with the aid of a
large magnifying glass a volume from the cabinet de lecture.

One day, a fortnight after my arrival at the Pension Beaurepas, I
came back, rather earlier than usual from my academic session; it
wanted half an hour of the midday breakfast. I went into the salon
with the design of possessing myself of the day's Galignani before
one of the little English old maids should have removed it to her
virginal bower--a privilege to which Madame Beaurepas frequently
alluded as one of the attractions of the establishment. In the salon
I found a new-comer, a tall gentleman in a high black hat, whom I
immediately recognised as a compatriot. I had often seen him, or his
equivalent, in the hotel parlours of my native land. He apparently
supposed himself to be at the present moment in a hotel parlour; his
hat was on his head, or, rather, half off it--pushed back from his
forehead, and rather suspended than poised. He stood before a table
on which old newspapers were scattered, one of which he had taken up
and, with his eye-glass on his nose, was holding out at arm's-length.
It was that honourable but extremely diminutive sheet, the Journal de
Geneve, a newspaper of about the size of a pocket-handkerchief. As I
drew near, looking for my Galignani, the tall gentleman gave me, over
the top of his eye-glass, a somewhat solemn stare. Presently,
however, before I had time to lay my hand on the object of my search,
he silently offered me the Journal de Geneve.

"It appears," he said, "to be the paper of the country."

"Yes," I answered, "I believe it's the best."

He gazed at it again, still holding it at