by rivals of the Rue de Normandie, who called her “a great blowsy thing,” Mme. Cibot might have sat as a model to Rubens.  Those flesh tints reminded you of the appetizing sheen on a pat of Isigny butter; but plump as she was, no woman went about her work with more agility.  Mme. Cibot had attained the time of life when women of her stamp are obliged to shave —­which is as much as to say that she had reached the age of forty-eight.  A porter’s wife with a moustache is one of the best possible guarantees of respectability and security that a landlord can have.  If Delacroix could have seen Mme. Cibot leaning proudly on her broom handle, he would assuredly have painted her as Bellona.

Strange as it may seem, the circumstances of the Cibots, man and wife (in the style of an indictment), were one day to affect the lives of the two friends; wherefore the chronicler, as in duty bound, must give some particulars as to the Cibots’ lodge.

The house brought in about eight thousand francs for there were three complete sets of apartments—­back and front, on the side nearest the Rue de Normandie, as well as the three floors in the older mansion between the courtyard and the garden, and a shop kept by a marine store-dealer named Remonencq, which fronted on the street.  During the past few months this Remonencq had begun to deal in old curiosities, and knew the value of Pons’ collection so well that he took off his hat whenever the musician came in or went out.

A sou in the livre on eight thousand francs therefore brought in about four hundred francs to the Cibots.  They had no rent to pay and no expenses for firing; Cibot’s earnings amounted on an average to seven or eight hundred francs, add tips at New Year, and the pair had altogether in income of sixteen hundred francs, every penny of which they spent, for the Cibots lived and fared better than working people usually do.  “One can only live once,” La Cibot used to say.  She was born during the Revolution, you see, and had never learned her Catechism.

The husband of this portress with the unblenching tawny eyes was an object of envy to the whole fraternity, for La Cibot had not forgotten the knowledge of cookery picked up at the Cadran Bleu.  So it had come to pass that the Cibots had passed the prime of life, and saw themselves on the threshold of old age without a hundred francs put by for the future.  Well clad and well fed, they enjoyed among the neighbors, it is true, the respect due to twenty-six years of strict honesty; for if they had nothing of their own, they “hadn’t nothing belonging to nobody else,” according to La Cibot, who was a prodigal of negatives.  “There wasn’t never such a love of a man,” she would say to her husband.  Do you ask why?  You might as well ask the reason of her indifference in matters of religion.