CHAPTER III


Madame Nanteuil lived with her daughter in a little flat on the fifth
story of a house in the Boulevard Saint-Michel, whose windows opened
upon the garden of the Luxembourg. She gave Chevalier a friendly
welcome, for she thought kindly of him because he loved Félicie, and
because the latter did not love him in return, and ignored on principle
the fact that he had been her daughter's lover.

She made him sit beside her in the dining-room, where a coke fire was
burning in the stove. In the lamplight army revolvers and sabres with
golden tassels on the sword-knots gleamed upon the wall. They were hung
about a woman's cuirass, which was provided with round breast-shields of
tin-plate; a piece of armour which Félicie had worn last winter, while
still a pupil at the Conservatoire, when taking the part of Joan of Arc
at the house of a spiritualistic duchess. An officer's widow and the
mother of an actress, Madame Nanteuil, whose real name was Nantean,
treasured these trophies.

"Félicie is not back yet, Monsieur Chevalier. I don't expect her before
midnight. She is on the stage till the end of the play."

"I know; I was in the first piece. I left the theatre after the first
act of _La Mère confidente_.