"It wasn't a real stroke, mesdames, it was only a warning!" was the
explanation conveyed to us in loud tones, with no reserve of whispered
delicacy, when we expressed regret at monsieur's detention below
stairs; a partially paralyzed leg, dragged painfully after the latter's
flabby figure, being the obvious cause of this detention.

The stairway had the line of beauty, describing a pretty curve before
its glassy steps led us to a narrow entry; it had also the brevity
which is said to be the very soul, _l'anima viva_, of all true wit; but
it was quite long and straight enough to serve Madame Fouchet as a
stage for a prolonged monologue, enlivened with much affluence of
gesture. Fouchet's seizure, his illness, his convalescence, and present
physical condition--a condition which appeared to be bristling with the
tragedy of danger, "un vrai drame d'anxiete"--was graphically conveyed
to us. The horrors of the long winter also, so sad for a Parisian--"si
triste pour la Parisienne, ces hivers de province"--together with the
miseries of her own home life, between this paralytic of a husband
below stairs, and above, her mother, an old lady of eighty, nailed to
her sofa with gout. "You may thus figure to yourselves, mesdames, what
a melancholy season is the winter! And now, with this villa still on
our hands, and the season already announcing itself, ruin stares us in
the face, mesdames--ruin!"

It was a moving picture. Yet we remained strangely unaffected by this
tale of woe. Madame Fouchet herself, the woman, not the actress, was to
blame, I think, for our unfeelingness. Somehow, to connect woe, ruin,
sadness, melancholy, or distress, in a word, of any kind with our
landlady's opulent figure, we found a difficult acrobatic mental feat.
She presented to the eye outlines and features that could only be