“Well, I hope that, at least, you have had a
pleasant walk?”
Monsieur d’Apreval replied:
“A delightful walk, I assure you; perfectly
delightful.”
They went there every evening about eleven o’clock,
just as they would go to the club. Six or eight
of them; always the same set, not fast men, but respectable
tradesmen, and young men in government or some other
employ, and they would drink their Chartreuse, and
laugh with the girls, or else talk seriously with
Madame Tellier, whom everybody respected, and then
they would go home at twelve o’clock! The
younger men would sometimes stay later.
It was a small, comfortable house painted yellow,
at the corner of a street behind Saint Etienne’s
Church, and from the windows one could see the docks
full of ships being unloaded, the big salt marsh, and,
rising beyond it, the Virgin’s Hill with its
old gray chapel.
Madame Tellier, who came of a respectable family of
peasant proprietors in the Department of the Eure,
had taken up her profession, just as she would have
become a milliner or dressmaker. The prejudice
which is so violent and deeply rooted in large towns,
does not exist in the country places in Normandy.
The peasant says:
“It is a paying-business,” and he sends
his daughter to keep an establishment of this character
just as he would send her to keep a girls’ school.
She had inherited the house from an old uncle, to
whom it had belonged. Monsieur and Madame Tellier,
who had formerly been innkeepers near Yvetot, had
immediately sold their house, as they thought that
the business at Fecamp was more profitable, and they
arrived one fine morning to assume the direction of
the enterprise, which was declining on account of
the absence of the proprietors. They were good
people enough in their way, and soon made themselves
liked by their staff and their neighbors.
Monsieur died of apoplexy two years later, for as
the new place kept him in idleness and without any
exercise, he had grown excessively stout, and his
health had suffered. Since she had been a widow,
all the frequenters of the establishment made much
of her; but people said that, personally, she was
quite virtuous, and even the girls in the house could
not discover anything against her. She was tall,
stout and affable, and her complexion, which had become
pale in the dimness of her house, the shutters of
which were scarcely ever opened, shone as if it had
been varnished. She had a fringe of curly false
hair, which gave her a juvenile look, that contrasted
strongly with the ripeness of her figure. She
was always smiling and cheerful, and was fond of a
joke, but there was a shade of reserve about her,
which her occupation had not quite made her lose.
Coarse words always shocked her, and when any young
fellow who had been badly brought up called her establishment
a hard name, she was angry and disgusted.
