and dabbled in her various utensils. This sounds as if life went on
in a very make-shift fashion at the Pension Beaurepas--as if the tone
of the establishment were sordid. But such was not at all the case.
We were simply very bourgeois; we practised the good old Genevese
principle of not sacrificing to appearances. This is an excellent
principle--when you have the reality. We had the reality at the
Pension Beaurepas: we had it in the shape of soft short beds,
equipped with fluffy duvets; of admirable coffee, served to us in the
morning by Celestine in person, as we lay recumbent on these downy
couches; of copious, wholesome, succulent dinners, conformable to the
best provincial traditions. For myself, I thought the Pension
Beaurepas picturesque, and this, with me, at that time was a great
word. I was young and ingenuous: I had just come from America. I
wished to perfect myself in the French tongue, and I innocently
believed that it flourished by Lake Leman. I used to go to lectures
at the Academy, and come home with a violent appetite. I always
enjoyed my morning walk across the long bridge (there was only one,
just there, in those days) which spans the deep blue out-gush of the
lake, and up the dark steep streets of the old Calvinistic city. The
garden faced this way, toward the lake and the old town; and this was
the pleasantest approach to the house. There was a high wall, with a
double gate in the middle, flanked by a couple of ancient massive
posts; the big rusty grille contained some old-fashioned iron-work.
The garden was rather mouldy and weedy, tangled and untended; but it
contained a little thin--flowing fountain, several green benches, a
rickety little table of the same complexion, and three orange-trees,
in tubs, which were deposited as effectively as possible in front of
the windows of the salon.