Pretty--very pretty--Madame Marneffe, the natural daughter of Comte
Montcornet, one of Napoleon's most famous officers, had, on the
strength of a marriage portion of twenty thousand francs, found a
husband in an inferior official at the War Office. Through the
interest of the famous lieutenant-general--made marshal of France six
months before his death--this quill-driver had risen to unhoped-for
dignity as head-clerk of his office; but just as he was to be promoted
to be deputy-chief, the marshal's death had cut off Marneffe's
ambitions and his wife's at the root. The very small salary enjoyed by
Sieur Marneffe had compelled the couple to economize in the matter of
rent; for in his hands Mademoiselle Valerie Fortin's fortune had
already melted away--partly in paying his debts, and partly in the
purchase of necessaries for furnishing a house, but chiefly in
gratifying the requirements of a pretty young wife, accustomed in her
mother's house to luxuries she did not choose to dispense with. The
situation of the Rue du Doyenne, within easy distance of the War
Office, and the gay part of Paris, smiled on Monsieur and Madame
Marneffe, and for the last four years they had dwelt under the same
roof as Lisbeth Fischer.

Monsieur Jean-Paul-Stanislas Marneffe was one of the class of employes
who escape sheer brutishness by the kind of power that comes of
depravity. The small, lean creature, with thin hair and a starved
beard, an unwholesome pasty face, worn rather than wrinkled, with
red-lidded eyes harnessed with spectacles, shuffling in his gait, and
yet meaner in his appearance, realized the type of man that any one
would conceive of as likely to be placed in the dock for an offence
against decency.

The rooms inhabited by this couple had the illusory appearance of sham