The charwoman brought her coffee, and Chirac’s newspaper; from which she learnt that the news of the victory which had sent the city mad on the previous day was utterly false.  Tears came into her eyes as she gazed absently at all the curtained windows of the courtyard.  She had youth and loveliness; according to the rules she ought to have been irresponsible, gay, and indulgently watched over by the wisdom of admiring age.  But she felt towards the French nation as a mother might feel towards adorable, wilful children suffering through their own charming foolishness.  She saw France personified in Chirac.  How easily, despite his special knowledge, he had yielded to the fever!  Her heart bled for France and Chirac on that morning of reaction and of truth.  She could not bear to recall the scene in the Place de la Concorde.  Madame Foucault had not descended.

CHAPTER VI

THE SIEGE

I

Madame Foucault came into Sophia’s room one afternoon with a peculiar guilty expression on her large face, and she held her peignoir close to her exuberant body in folds consciously majestic, as though endeavouring to prove to Sophia by her carriage that despite her shifting eyes she was the most righteous and sincere woman that ever lived.

It was Saturday, the third of September, a beautiful day.  Sophia, suffering from an unimportant relapse, had remained in a state of inactivity, and had scarcely gone out at all.  She loathed the flat, but lacked the energy to leave it every day.  There was no sufficiently definite object in leaving it.  She could not go out and look for health as she might have looked for flowers.  So she remained in the flat, and stared at the courtyard and the continual mystery of lives hidden behind curtains that occasionally moved.  And the painted yellow walls of the house, and the papered walls of her room pressed upon her and crushed her.  For a few days Chirac had called daily, animated by the most adorable solicitude.  Then he had ceased to call.  She had tired of reading the journals; they lay unopened.  The relations between Madame Foucault and herself, and her status in the flat of which she now legally owned the furniture,—­these things were left unsettled.  But the question of her board was arranged on the terms that she halved the cost of food and service with Madame Foucault; her expenses were thus reduced to the lowest possible—­about eighteen francs a week.  An idea hung in the air—­like a scientific discovery on the point of being made by several independent investigators simultaneously—­that she and Madame Foucault should co-operate in order to let furnished rooms at a remunerative profit.  Sophia felt the nearness of the idea and she wanted to be shocked at the notion of any avowed association between herself and Madame Foucault; but she could not be.

“Here are a lady and a gentleman who want a bedroom,” began Madame Foucault, “a nice large bedroom, furnished.”