for.  With what arrogant gestures Madame Foucault would descend from a carriage at the great door!  What respectful attitudes and tones the ageing courtesan would receive from the wife and children of the concierge!  But beneath these conventional fictions the truth was that the concierge held the whip.  At last he was using it.  And he had given himself a half-holiday in order to celebrate his second acquirement of the ostentatious furniture and the crimson lampshades.  This was one of the dramatic crises in his career as a man of substance.  The national thrill of victory had not penetrated into the flat with the concierge and the law.  The emotions of the concierge were entirely independent of the Napoleonic foreign policy.

As Sophia, sick with a sudden disillusion, was putting her things together, and wondering where she was to go, and whether it would be politic to consult Chirac, she heard a fluster at the front door:  cries, protestations, implorings.  Her own door was thrust open, and Madame Foucault burst in.

“Save me!” exclaimed Madame Foucault, sinking to the ground.

The feeble theatricality of the gesture offended Sophia’s taste.  She asked sternly what Madame Foucault expected her to do.  Had not Madame Foucault knowingly exposed her, without the least warning, to the extreme annoyance of this visit of the law, a visit which meant practically that Sophia was put into the street?

“You must not be hard!” Madame Foucault sobbed.

Sophia learnt the complete history of the woman’s efforts to pay for the furniture:  a farrago of folly and deceptions.  Madame Foucault confessed too much.  Sophia scorned confession for the sake of confession.  She scorned the impulse which forces a weak creature to insist on its weakness, to revel in remorse, and to find an excuse for its conduct in the very fact that there is no excuse.  She gathered that Madame Foucault had in fact gone away in the hope that Sophia, trapped, would pay; and that in the end, she had not even had the courage of her own trickery, and had run back, driven by panic into audacity, to fall at Sophia’s feet, lest Sophia might not have yielded and the furniture have been seized.  From, beginning to end the conduct of Madame Foucault had been fatuous and despicable and wicked.  Sophia coldly condemned Madame Foucault for having allowed herself to be brought into the world with such a weak and maudlin character, and for having allowed herself to grow old and ugly.  As a sight the woman was positively disgraceful.

“Save me!” she exclaimed again.  “I did what I could for you!”

Sophia hated her.  But the logic of the appeal was irresistible.

“But what can I do?” she asked reluctantly.

“Lend me the money.  You can.  If you don’t, this will be the end for me.”

“And a good thing, too!” thought Sophia’s hard sense.

“How much is it?” Sophia glumly asked.

“It isn’t a thousand francs!” said Madame Foucault with eagerness.  “All my beautiful furniture will go for less than a thousand francs!  Save me!”