Madame’s room was an exception to the squalid slovenliness that disgraced the living rooms, where the curtains were yellow with smoke and dust, and where the child, evidently left to himself, littered every spot with his toys.  Valerie’s room and dressing-room were situated in the part of the house which, on one side of the courtyard, joined the front half, looking out on the street, to the wing forming the inner side of the court backing against the adjoining property.  Handsomely hung with chintz, furnished with rosewood, and thickly carpeted, they proclaimed themselves as belonging to a pretty woman —­and indeed suggested the kept mistress.  A clock in the fashionable style stood on the velvet-covered mantelpiece.  There was a nicely fitted cabinet, and the Chinese flower-stands were handsomely filled.  The bed, the toilet-table, the wardrobe with its mirror, the little sofa, and all the lady’s frippery bore the stamp of fashion or caprice.  Though everything was quite third-rate as to elegance or quality, and nothing was absolutely newer than three years old, a dandy would have had no fault to find but that the taste of all this luxury was commonplace.  Art, and the distinction that comes of the choice of things that taste assimilates, was entirely wanting.  A doctor of social science would have detected a lover in two or three specimens of costly trumpery, which could only have come there through that demi-god—­always absent, but always present if the lady is married.

The dinner, four hours behind time, to which the husband, wife, and child sat down, betrayed the financial straits in which the household found itself, for the table is the surest thermometer for gauging the income of a Parisian family.  Vegetable soup made with the water haricot beans had been boiled in, a piece of stewed veal and potatoes sodden with water by way of gravy, a dish of haricot beans, and cheap cherries, served and eaten in cracked plates and dishes, with the dull-looking and dull-sounding forks of German silver—­was this a banquet worthy of this pretty young woman?  The Baron would have wept could he have seen it.  The dingy decanters could not disguise the vile hue of wine bought by the pint at the nearest wineshop.  The table-napkins had seen a week’s use.  In short, everything betrayed undignified penury, and the equal indifference of the husband and wife to the decencies of home.  The most superficial observer on seeing them would have said that these two beings had come to the stage when the necessity of living had prepared them for any kind of dishonor that might bring luck to them.  Valerie’s first words to her husband will explain the delay that had postponed the dinner by the not disinterested devotion of the cook.

“Samanon will only take your bills at fifty per cent, and insists on a lien on your salary as security.”

So poverty, still unconfessed in the house of the superior official, and hidden under a stipend of twenty-four thousand francs, irrespective of presents, had reached its lowest stage in that of the clerk.