Still, it is
easily conceivable that a clerk who goes early every morning to his
office, comes home only to dinner, and spends every evening out, and a
woman swallowed up in a round of pleasures, should know nothing of an
old maid living on the third floor beyond the courtyard of the house
they dwell in, especially when she lives as Mademoiselle Fischer did.
Up in the morning before any one else, Lisbeth went out to buy her
bread, milk, and live charcoal, never speaking to any one, and she
went to bed with the sun; she never had a letter or a visitor, nor
chatted with her neighbors. Here was one of those anonymous,
entomological existences such as are to be met with in many large
tenements where, at the end of four years, you unexpectedly learn that
up on the fourth floor there is an old man lodging who knew Voltaire,
Pilatre de Rozier, Beaujon, Marcel, Mole, Sophie Arnould, Franklin,
and Robespierre. What Monsieur and Madame Marneffe had just said
concerning Lisbeth Fischer they had come to know, in consequence,
partly, of the loneliness of the neighborhood, and of the alliance, to
which their necessities had led, between them and the doorkeepers,
whose goodwill was too important to them not to have been carefully
encouraged.
Now, the old maid's pride, silence, and reserve had engendered in the
porter and his wife the exaggerated respect and cold civility which
betray the unconfessed annoyance of an inferior. Also, the porter
thought himself in all essentials the equal of any lodger whose rent
was no more than two hundred and fifty francs.
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