“Oh no, no, never!” she said stiffly.  “Not three months ago she positively insisted on leaving her boarding school.  I was thinking of marrying her off at once, but she loves me so that I had to take her home—­oh, so much against my will!”

Her blue eyelids with their blackened lashes blinked and wavered while she spoke of the business of settling her young lady.  If at her time of life she hadn’t laid by a sou but was still always working to minister to men’s pleasures, especially those very young men, whose grandmother she might well be, it was truly because she considered a good match of far greater importance than mere savings.  And with that she leaned over La Faloise, who reddened under the huge, naked, plastered shoulder with which she well-nigh crushed him.

“You know,” she murmured, “if she fails it won’t be my fault.  But they’re so strange when they’re young!”

There was a considerable bustle round the table, and the waiters became very active.  After the third course the entrees had made their appearance; they consisted of pullets a la marechale, fillets of sole with shallot sauce and escalopes of Strasbourg pate.  The manager, who till then had been having Meursault served, now offered Chambertin and Leoville.  Amid the slight hubbub which the change of plates involved Georges, who was growing momentarily more astonished, asked Daguenet if all the ladies present were similarly provided with children, and the other, who was amused by this question, gave him some further details.  Lucy Stewart was the daughter of a man of English origin who greased the wheels of the trains at the Gare du Nord; she was thirty-nine years old and had the face of a horse but was adorable withal and, though consumptive, never died.  In fact, she was the smartest woman there and represented three princes and a duke.  Caroline Hequet, born at Bordeaux, daughter of a little clerk long since dead of shame, was lucky enough to be possessed of a mother with a head on her shoulders, who, after having cursed her, had made it up again at the end of a year of reflection, being minded, at any rate, to save a fortune for her daughter.  The latter was twenty-five years old and very passionless and was held to be one of the finest women it is possible to enjoy.  Her price never varied.  The mother, a model of orderliness, kept the accounts and noted down receipts and expenditures with severe precision.  She managed the whole household from some small lodging two stories above her daughter’s, where, moreover, she had established a workroom for dressmaking and plain sewing.  As to Blanche de Sivry, whose real name was Jacqueline Bandu, she hailed from a village near Amiens.  Magnificent in person, stupid and untruthful in character, she gave herself out as the granddaughter of a general and never owned to her thirty-two summers.  The Russians had a great taste for her, owing to her embonpoint.  Then Daguenet added a rapid word or two about the rest.  There was