foreseeing activity of a mistress.  The linen was heaped in disorder, piles on piles in great wide-open cupboards, fine linen sheets and table-cloths crumpled up, the locks prevented from shutting by pieces of torn lace, which no one took the trouble to mend.  And yet there were many servants about—­negresses in yellow Madras muslin, who came to snatch here a towel, there a table-cloth, walking among the scattered domestic treasures, dragging with their great flat feet frills of fine lace from a petticoat which some lady’s-maid had thrown down—­thimble here, scissors there—­ready to pick up again in a few minutes.

Jansoulet’s mother was doubly wounded.  The half-rustic artisan in her was outraged in the tenderness, the respect, the sweet unreasonableness the woman of the provinces feels towards a full linen cupboard—­a cupboard filled piece by piece, full of relics of past struggles, whose contents grow finer little by little, the first token of comfort, of wealth, in the house.  Besides, she had held the distaff from morning till night, and if the housewife in her was angry, the spinner could have wept at the profanation.  At last, unable to contain herself longer, she rose, and actively, her little shawl displaced at each movement, she set herself to pick up, straighten, and carefully fold this magnificent linen, as she used to do in the fields of Saint-Romans, when she gave herself the treat of a grand washing-day, with twenty washerwomen, the clothes-baskets flowing over with floating whiteness, and the sheets flapping in the morning wind on the clothes-lines.  She was in the midst of this occupation, forgetting her journey, forgetting Paris, even the place where she was, when a stout, thick-set, bearded man, with varnished boots and a velvet jacket, over the torso of a bull, came into the linen-room.

“What!  Cabassu!”

“You here, Mme. Francoise!  What a surprise!” said the masseur, staring like a bronze figure.

“Yes, my brave Cabassu, it is I. I have just arrived; and as you see, I am at work already.  It made my heart bleed to see all this muddle.”

“You came up for the sitting, then?”

“What sitting?”

“Why, the grand sitting of the legislative body.  It’s do-day.”

“Dear me, no.  What has that got to do with me?  I should understand nothing at all about it.  No, I came because I wanted to know my little Jansoulets, and then, I was beginning to feel uneasy.  I have written several times without getting an answer.  I was afraid that there was a child sick, that Bernard’s business was going wrong—­all sorts of ideas.  At last I got seriously worried, and came away at once.  They are well here, they tell me.”

“Yes, Mme. Francoise.  Thank God, every one is quite well.”

“And Bernard.  His business—­is that going on as he wants it to?”

“Well, you know one has always one’s little worries in life—­still, I don’t think he should complain.  But, now I think of it, you must be hungry.  I will go and make them bring you something.”