The breeches-maker’s business sold for about twenty thousand francs, and the widow invested the money in the Funds in 1820.  The income of eleven hundred francs per annum derived from this source was, at one time, her whole fortune.  For many a year the neighbors used to see the doctor’s linen hanging out to dry upon a clothes-line in the garden, and the servant and Mme. Poulain thriftily washed everything at home; a piece of domestic economy which did not a little to injure the doctor’s practice, for it was thought that if he was so poor, it must be through his own fault.  Her eleven hundred francs scarcely did more than pay the rent.  During those early days, Mme. Poulain, good, stout, little old woman, was the breadwinner, and the poor household lived upon her earnings.  After twelve years of perseverance upon a rough and stony road, Dr. Poulain at last was making an income of three thousand francs, and Mme. Poulain had an income of about five thousand francs at her disposal.  Five thousand francs for those who know Paris means a bare subsistence.

The sitting-room, where patients waited for an interview, was shabbily furnished.  There was the inevitable mahogany sofa covered with yellow-flowered Utrecht velvet, four easy-chairs, a tea-table, a console, and half-a-dozen chairs, all the property of the deceased breeches-maker, and chosen by him.  A lyre-shaped clock between two Egyptian candlesticks still preserved its glass shade intact.  You asked yourself how the yellow chintz window-curtains, covered with red flowers, had contrived to hang together for so long; for evidently they had come from the Jouy factory, and Oberkampf received the Emperor’s congratulations upon similar hideous productions of the cotton industry in 1809.

The doctor’s consulting-room was fitted up in the same style, with household stuff from the paternal chamber.  It looked stiff, poverty-stricken, and bare.  What patient could put faith in the skill of any unknown doctor who could not even furnish his house?  And this in a time when advertising is all-powerful; when we gild the gas-lamps in the Place de la Concorde to console the poor man for his poverty by reminding him that he is rich as a citizen.

The ante-chamber did duty as a dining-room.  The servant sat at her sewing there whenever she was not busy in the kitchen or keeping the doctor’s mother company.  From the dingy short curtains in the windows you would have guessed at the shabby thrift behind them without setting foot in the dreary place.  What could those wall-cupboards contain but stale scraps of food, chipped earthenware, corks used over and over again indefinitely, soiled table-linen, odds and ends that could descend but one step lower into the dust-heap, and all the squalid necessities of a pinched household in Paris?