discount, which, as was his wont, he never refused point-blank. Two
good Normandy horses were dying of their own fat in the stables of the
big house; Madame Guillaume never used them but to drag her on Sundays
to high Mass at the parish church. Three times a week the worthy
couple kept open house. By the influence of his son-in-law
Sommervieux, Monsieur Guillaume had been named a member of the
consulting board for the clothing of the Army. Since her husband had
stood so high in office, Madame Guillaume had decided that she must
receive; her rooms were so crammed with gold and silver ornaments, and
furniture, tasteless but of undoubted value, that the simplest room in
the house looked like a chapel. Economy and expense seemed to be
struggling for the upper hand in every accessory. It was as though
Monsieur Guillaume had looked to a good investment, even in the
purchase of a candlestick. In the midst of this bazaar, where splendor
revealed the owner's want of occupation, Sommervieux's famous picture
filled the place of honor, and in it Monsieur and Madame Guillaume
found their chief consolation, turning their eyes, harnessed with
eye-glasses, twenty times a day on this presentment of their past life,
to them so active and amusing. The appearance of this mansion and these
rooms, where everything had an aroma of staleness and mediocrity, the
spectacle offered by these two beings, cast away, as it were, on a
rock far from the world and the ideas which are life, startled
Augustine; she could here contemplate the sequel of the scene of which
the first part had struck her at the house of Lebas--a life of stir
without movement, a mechanical and instinctive existence like that of
the beaver; and then she felt an indefinable pride in her troubles, as
she reflected that they had their source in eighteen months of such
happiness as, in her eyes, was worth a thousand lives like this; its
vacuity seemed to her horrible. However, she concealed this not very
charitable feeling, and displayed for her parents her newly-acquired