The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes by Israel Zangwill
page 3 of 523 (00%)
page 3 of 523 (00%)
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THE GREY WIG I They both styled themselves "Madame," but only the younger of the old ladies had been married. Madame Valière was still a _demoiselle_, but as she drew towards sixty it had seemed more _convenable_ to possess a mature label. Certainly Madame Dépine had no visible matrimonial advantages over her fellow-lodger at the Hôtel des Tourterelles, though in the symmetrical cemetery of Montparnasse (Section 22) wreaths of glass beads testified to a copious domesticity in the far past, and a newspaper picture of a _chasseur d'Afrique_ pinned over her bed recalled--though only the uniform was the dead soldier's--the son she had contributed to France's colonial empire. Practically it was two old maids--or two lone widows--whose boots turned pointed toes towards each other in the dark cranny of the rambling, fusty corridor of the sky-floor. Madame Dépine was round, and grew dumpier with age; "Madame" Valière was long, and grew slimmer. Otherwise their lives ran parallel. For the true madame of the establishment you had to turn to Madame la Propriétaire, with her buxom bookkeeper of a daughter and her tame baggage-bearing husband. This full-blooded, jovial creature, with her swart moustache, represented the only Parisian success of three provincial lives, and, in her good-nature, had permitted her decayed townswomen--at as low a rent as was compatible with prudence--to shelter themselves under her roof and as near it as possible. Her house being a profitable warren of American |
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