Her rooms, the whole of the second floor of a modern house in the Rue Vanneau, between a fore-court and a garden, was redolent of respectability.  All its luxury was in good chintz hangings and handsome convenient furniture.

Her bedroom, indeed, was the exception, and rich with such profusion as Jenny Cadine or Madame Schontz might have displayed.  There were lace curtains, cashmere hangings, brocade portieres, a set of chimney ornaments modeled by Stidmann, a glass cabinet filled with dainty nicknacks.  Hulot could not bear to see his Valerie in a bower of inferior magnificence to the dunghill of gold and pearls owned by a Josepha.  The drawing-room was furnished with red damask, and the dining-room had carved oak panels.  But the Baron, carried away by his wish to have everything in keeping, had at the end of six months, added solid luxury to mere fashion, and had given her handsome portable property, as, for instance, a service of plate that was to cost more than twenty-four thousand francs.

Madame Marneffe’s house had in a couple of years achieved a reputation for being a very pleasant one.  Gambling went on there.  Valerie herself was soon spoken of as an agreeable and witty woman.  To account for her change of style, a rumor was set going of an immense legacy bequeathed to her by her “natural father,” Marshal Montcornet, and left in trust.

With an eye to the future, Valerie had added religious to social hypocrisy.  Punctual at the Sunday services, she enjoyed all the honors due to the pious.  She carried the bag for the offertory, she was a member of a charitable association, presented bread for the sacrament, and did some good among the poor, all at Hector’s expense.  Thus everything about the house was extremely seemly.  And a great many persons maintained that her friendship with the Baron was entirely innocent, supporting the view by the gentleman’s mature age, and ascribing to him a Platonic liking for Madame Marneffe’s pleasant wit, charming manners, and conversation—­such a liking as that of the late lamented Louis XVIII. for a well-turned note.

The Baron always withdrew with the other company at about midnight, and came back a quarter of an hour later.

The secret of this secrecy was as follows.  The lodge-keepers of the house were a Monsieur and Madame Olivier, who, under the Baron’s patronage, had been promoted from their humble and not very lucrative post in the Rue du Doyenne to the highly-paid and handsome one in the Rue Vanneau.  Now, Madame Olivier, formerly a needlewoman in the household of Charles X., who had fallen in the world with the legitimate branch, had three children.  The eldest, an under-clerk in a notary’s office, was object of his parents’ adoration.  This Benjamin, for six years in danger of being drawn for the army, was on the point of being interrupted in his legal career, when Madame Marneffe contrived to have him declared exempt for one of those little malformations which the Examining Board can always discern when requested in a whisper by some power in the ministry.  So Olivier, formerly a huntsman to the King, and his wife would have crucified the Lord again for the Baron or for Madame Marneffe.