Beautiful Lisa protested against this, but she turned very pale, for Mademoiselle Saget’s last thrust had touched a vulnerable point.  From that day forward the old maid was ever bringing her stories of innocent people who had been thrown into prison for extending hospitality to criminal scoundrels.  In the evening, when La Saget went to get her black-currant syrup at the wine dealer’s, she prepared her budget for the next morning.  Rose was but little given to gossiping, and the old main reckoned chiefly on her own eyes and ears.  She had been struck by Monsieur Lebigre’s extremely kind and obliging manner towards Florent, his eagerness to keep him at his establishment, all the polite civilities, for which the little money which the other spent in the house could never recoup him.  And this conduct of Monsieur Lebigre’s surprised her the more as she was aware of the position in which the two men stood in respect to the beautiful Norman.

“It looks as though Lebigre were fattening him up for sale,” she reflected.  “Whom can he want to sell him to, I wonder?”

One evening when she was in the bar she saw Logre fling himself on the bench in the sanctum, and heard him speak of his perambulations through the faubourgs, with the remark that he was dead beat.  She cast a hasty glance at his feet, and saw that there was not a speck of dust on his boots.  Then she smiled quietly, and went off with her black-currant syrup, her lips closely compressed.

She used to complete her budget of information on getting back to her window.  It was very high up, commanding a view of all the neighbouring houses, and proved a source of endless enjoyment to her.  She was constantly installed at it, as though it were an observatory from which she kept watch upon everything that went on in the neighbourhood.  She was quite familiar with all the rooms opposite her, both on the right and the left, even to the smallest details of their furniture.  She could have described, without the least omission, the habits of their tenants, have related if the latter’s homes were happy or the contrary, have told when and how they washed themselves, what they had for dinner, and who it was that came to see them.  Then she obtained a side view of the markets, and not a woman could walk along the Rue Rambuteau without being seen by her; and she could have correctly stated whence the woman had come and whither she was going, what she had got in her basket, and, in short, every detail about her, her husband, her clothes, her children, and her means.  “That’s Madame Loret, over there; she’s giving her son a fine education; that’s Madame Hutin, a poor little woman who’s dreadfully neglected by her husband; that’s Mademoiselle Cecile, the butcher’s daughter, a girl that no one will marry because she’s scrofulous.”  In this way she could have continued jerking out biographical scraps for days together, deriving extraordinary amusement from the most trivial, uninteresting incidents.  However,