art-students, tempered by native journalists and decadent poets, she
could, moreover, afford to let the old ladies off coffee and candles.
They were at liberty to prepare their own _déjeuner_ in winter or to
buy it outside in summer; they could burn their own candles or sit in
the dark, as the heart in them pleased; and thus they were as cheaply
niched as any one in the gay city. _Rentières_ after their meticulous
fashion, they drew a ridiculous but regular amount from the mysterious
coffers of the Crédit Lyonnais.

But though they met continuously in the musty corridor, and even
dined--when they did dine--at the same _crémerie_, they never spoke to
each other. Madame la Propriétaire was the channel through which they
sucked each other's history, for though they had both known her in
their girlish days at Tonnerre, in the department of Yonne, they had
not known each other. Madame Valière (Madame Dépine learnt, and it
seemed to explain the frigidity of her neighbour's manner) still
trailed clouds of glory from the service of a Princess a quarter of a
century before. Her refusal to wink at the Princess's goings-on, her
austere, if provincial, regard for the convenances, had cost her
the place, and from these purpureal heights she had fallen lower and
lower, till she struck the attic of the Hôtel des Tourterelles.

But even a haloed past does not give one a licence to annoy one's
neighbours. Madame Dépine felt resentfully, and she hated Madame
Valière as a haughty minion of royalty, who kept a cough, which barked
loudest in the silence of the night.

"Why doesn't she go to the hospital, your Princess?" she complained to
Madame la Propriétaire.