“You have caught on with the chief,” said the man, looking at his wife.

“I rather think so,” replied she, understanding the full meaning of his slang expression.

“What is to become of us?” Marneffe went on.  “The landlord will be down on us to-morrow.  And to think of your father dying without making a will!  On my honor, those men of the Empire all think themselves as immortal as their Emperor.”

“Poor father!” said she.  “I was his only child, and he was very fond of me.  The Countess probably burned the will.  How could he forget me when he used to give us as much as three or four thousand-franc notes at once, from time to time?”

“We owe four quarters’ rent, fifteen hundred francs.  Is the furniture worth so much? That is the question, as Shakespeare says.”

“Now, good-bye, ducky!” said Valerie, who had only eaten a few mouthfuls of the veal, from which the maid had extracted all the gravy for a brave soldier just home from Algiers.  “Great evils demand heroic remedies.”

“Valerie, where are you off to?” cried Marneffe, standing between his wife and the door.

“I am going to see the landlord,” she replied, arranging her ringlets under her smart bonnet.  “You had better try to make friends with that old maid, if she really is your chief’s cousin.”

The ignorance in which the dwellers under one roof can exist as to the social position of their fellow-lodgers is a permanent fact which, as much as any other, shows what the rush of Paris life is.  Still, it is easily conceivable that a clerk who goes early every morning to his office, comes home only to dinner, and spends every evening out, and a woman swallowed up in a round of pleasures, should know nothing of an old maid living on the third floor beyond the courtyard of the house they dwell in, especially when she lives as Mademoiselle Fischer did.

Up in the morning before any one else, Lisbeth went out to buy her bread, milk, and live charcoal, never speaking to any one, and she went to bed with the sun; she never had a letter or a visitor, nor chatted with her neighbors.  Here was one of those anonymous, entomological existences such as are to be met with in many large tenements where, at the end of four years, you unexpectedly learn that up on the fourth floor there is an old man lodging who knew Voltaire, Pilatre de Rozier, Beaujon, Marcel, Mole, Sophie Arnould, Franklin, and Robespierre.  What Monsieur and Madame Marneffe had just said concerning Lisbeth Fischer they had come to know, in consequence, partly, of the loneliness of the neighborhood, and of the alliance, to which their necessities had led, between them and the doorkeepers, whose goodwill was too important to them not to have been carefully encouraged.

Now, the old maid’s pride, silence, and reserve had engendered in the porter and his wife the exaggerated respect and cold civility which betray the unconfessed annoyance of an inferior.  Also, the porter thought himself in all essentials the equal of any lodger whose rent was no more than two hundred and fifty francs.  Cousin Betty’s confidences to Hortense were true; and it is evident that the porter’s wife might be very likely to slander Mademoiselle Fischer in her intimate gossip with the Marneffes, while only intending to tell tales.