For guilty
dissipation the young provincial had no taste. Did he not carry the
images of two kind and pure women about with him wherever he went, like
two attendant angels ever protecting his steps; and could he leave them
sorrowing on thresholds _they_ could not pass? Ah, no! He was loud and
boisterous and wild of spirits in those early days, but incapable of
meanness or vice.
"It is a brave heart," Madame Magnotte said of him, "though for the
breaking of glasses a scourge--_un fleau_."
The ladies of the Pension Magnotte were for the most part of mature age
and unattractive appearance--two or three lonely spinsters, eking out
their pitiful little incomes as best they might, by the surreptitious
sale of delicate embroideries, confectioned in their dismal leisure; and
a fat elderly widow, popularly supposed to be enormously rich, but of
miserly propensities. "It is the widow of Harpagon himself," Madame
Magnotte told her gossips--an old woman with two furiously ugly
daughters, who for the last fifteen years had lived a nomadic life in
divers boarding-houses, fondly clinging to the hope that, amongst so many
strange bachelors, husbands for these two solitary ones must at last be
found.
These, with a pale young lady who gave music lessons in the quarter, were
all the feminine inmates of the mansion; and amongst these Gustave
Lenoble was chief favourite.
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