wife.  That Quenu, by the way, was a lucky fellow; he wasn’t a beauty himself, yet he had secured a beautiful wife, who had disinterred a fortune for him.  Some even went so far as to whisper that Lisa was a simpleton for having acted as she had done; but the young woman only smiled when people speaking to her vaguely alluded to all these things.  She and her husband lived on as previously, in happy placidity and quiet affection.  She still assisted him as before, their hands still met amidst the sausage-meat, she still glanced over his shoulder into the pots and pans, and still nothing but the great fire in the kitchen brought the blood to their cheeks.

However, Lisa was a woman of practical common sense, and speedily saw the folly of allowing eighty-five thousand francs to lie idle in a chest of drawers.  Quenu would have willingly stowed them away again at the bottom of the salting-tub until he had gained as much more, when they could have retired from business and have gone to live at Suresnes, a suburb to which both were partial.  Lisa, however, had other ambitions.  The Rue Pirouette did not accord with her ideas of cleanliness, her craving for fresh air, light, and healthy life.  The shop where Uncle Gradelle had accumulated his fortune, sou by sou, was a long, dark place, one of those suspicious looking pork butchers’ shops of the old quarters of the city, where the well-worn flagstones retain a strong odour of meat in spite of constant washings.  Now the young woman longed for one of those bright modern shops, ornamented like a drawing-room, and fringing the footway of some broad street with windows of crystalline transparence.  She was not actuated by any petty ambition to play the fine lady behind a stylish counter, but clearly realised that commerce in its latest development needed elegant surroundings.  Quenu showed much alarm the first time his wife suggested that they ought to move and spend some of their money in decorating a new shop.  However, Lisa only shrugged her shoulders and smiled at finding him so timorous.

One evening, when night was falling and the shop had grown dark, Quenu and Lisa overheard a woman of the neighbourhood talking to a friend outside their door.

“No, indeed!  I’ve given up dealing with them,” said she.  “I wouldn’t buy a bit of black-pudding from them now on any account.  They had a dead man in their kitchen, you know.”

Quenu wept with vexation.  The story of Gradelle’s death in the kitchen was clearly getting about; and his nephew began to blush before his customers when he saw them sniffing his wares too closely.  So, of his own accord, he spoke to his wife of her proposal to take a new shop.  Lisa, without saying anything, had already been looking out for other premises, and had found some, admirably situated, only a few yards away, in the Rue Rambuteau.  The immediate neighbourhood of the central markets, which were being opened just opposite, would triple their business, and make their shop known all over Paris.