en Lucie heard the news, she looked vexed, and, said spitefully:

"I had hoped that he would have blown his brains out!"

FALSE ALARM

"I have a perfect horror of pianos," Fremecourt said, "of those hateful
boxes that fill up a drawing-room, and which have not even the soft
sound and the queer shape of the mahogany or veneered spinets, to which
our grandmothers sighed out exquisite, long-forgotten ballads, and
allowed their fingers to run over the keys, while around them there
floated a delicate odor of powder and muslin, and some little _Abbe_ or
other turned over the leaves, and was continually making mistakes, as he
was looking at the patches close to the lips on the white skin of the
player instead of at the music.

"I wish there were a tax upon them, or that some evening, during a riot,
the people would make huge bonfires of them, which would illuminate the
whole town. They simply exasperate me, and affect my nerves, and make me
think of the tortures those poor girls must suffer, who are condemned
not to stir for hours, but to keep on constantly strumming away at the
chromatic scales and monotonous arpeggios, and to have no other object
in life except to win a prize at the _Conservatoire_.

"Their incoherent music suggests to me the sufferings of those who are
ill, abandoned, wounded, as it proceeds from every floor of every house,
and irritates you, nearly drives you mad, and makes you break out into
ironical fits of laughter.

"And yet when that madcap Lalie Spring honored me with her love, as I
never can refuse anything to a woman who smells of fresh scent, and who
has a large store of promises in her looks, and who puts out her red,
smiling lips immediately, as if she were going to offer you handsel
money, I bought a piano, so that she might strum upon it to her heart's
content. I got it, however, on the hire-purchase system, and paid so
much a month, like _grisettes_[9] do for their furniture.

[Footnote 9: Work-girl, a name applied to those whose virtue is not too
rigorous.--TRANSLATOR.]

"At that time, I had the apartments I had so long dreamed of: warm,
elegant, light, well-arranged, with two entrances, and an incomparable
porter's wife; she had been canteen-keeper in a Zouave regiment, and
knew everything and understood everything at a wink.

"It was the kind of apartment from which a woman has not the courage to
escape, so as to avoid temptation, but becomes weak, and rolls herself
up on