This little scene, in which the two friends had bluntly uttered their ideas without any circumlocution in expressing them, took place immediately on Lisbeth’s return from market, whither she had been to procure the materials for an elegant dinner.  Marneffe, who hoped to get Coquet’s place, was to entertain him and the virtuous Madame Coquet, and Valerie hoped to persuade Hulot, that very evening, to consider the head-clerk’s resignation.

Lisbeth dressed to go to the Baroness, with whom she was to dine.

“You will come back in time to make tea for us, my Betty?” said Valerie.

“I hope so.”

“You hope so—­why?  Have you come to sleeping with Adeline to drink her tears while she is asleep?”

“If only I could!” said Lisbeth, laughing.  “I would not refuse.  She is expiating her happiness—­and I am glad, for I remember our young days.  It is my turn now.  She will be in the mire, and I shall be Comtesse de Forzheim!”

Lisbeth set out for the Rue Plumet, where she now went as to the theatre—­to indulge her emotions.

The residence Hulot had found for his wife consisted of a large, bare entrance-room, a drawing-room, and a bed and dressing-room.  The dining-room was next the drawing-room on one side.  Two servants’ rooms and a kitchen on the third floor completed the accommodation, which was not unworthy of a Councillor of State, high up in the War Office.  The house, the court-yard, and the stairs were extremely handsome.

The Baroness, who had to furnish her drawing-room, bed-room, and dining-room with the relics of her splendor, had brought away the best of the remains from the house in the Rue de l’Universite.  Indeed, the poor woman was attached to these mute witnesses of her happier life; to her they had an almost consoling eloquence.  In memory she saw her flowers, as in the carpets she could trace patterns hardly visible now to other eyes.

On going into the spacious anteroom, where twelve chairs, a barometer, a large stove, and long, white cotton curtains, bordered with red, suggested the dreadful waiting-room of a Government office, the visitor felt oppressed, conscious at once of the isolation in which the mistress lived.  Grief, like pleasure, infects the atmosphere.  A first glance into any home is enough to tell you whether love or despair reigns there.

Adeline would be found sitting in an immense bedroom with beautiful furniture by Jacob Desmalters, of mahogany finished in the Empire style with ormolu, which looks even less inviting than the brass-work of Louis XVI.!  It gave one a shiver to see this lonely woman sitting on a Roman chair, a work-table with sphinxes before her, colorless, affecting false cheerfulness, but preserving her imperial air, as she had preserved the blue velvet gown she always wore in the house.  Her proud spirit sustained her strength and preserved her beauty.

The Baroness, by the end of her first year of banishment to this apartment, had gauged every depth of misfortune.