. And her anecdotes of Josephine, and of the ladies of the
court! One especial tale Madame Leveque was never tired of telling: it
was of the fire at the Austrian embassy, the night of the famous ball
given by the Princess of Schwartzenberg. All her subsequent years had
been lighted by those flames, and by that light she saw a procession of
gorgeous marshals, tall ladies in very low dresses, with heads dressed
_a la Titus or a la Grecque_, and the emperor, in his green coat and
white trousers, carrying in his arms across the garden the fainting
Madame de Schwartzenberg.

Ida, with her passion for rank, delighted in the society of this
half-crazed old creature, and while the two women sat in the dark
shop, with the names of dukes and marquises gliding lightly from their
tongues, a workman would come in to buy a paper for a sou, or some
woman, impatient for the conclusion of some serial romance, would come
in to ask if the magazine had not yet arrived, and cheerfully pay the
two cents that would deprive her, if she were old, of her snuff, and, if
she were young, of her radishes for breakfast.

Occasionally Madame Leveque passed a Sunday with friends, and then Ida
had no other amusement than that which she derived from turning over a
pile of books taken at hazard from Madame Leveque's shelves. These books
were soiled and tumbled, with spots of grease and crumbs of bread upon
them, showing that they had been read while eating. She sat reading by
the window,--reading until her head swam. She read to escape thinking.
Singularly out of place in this house, the incessant toil that she saw
going on about her depressed her, instead of, as with her son, exciting
her to more strenuous exertions.

The pale, sad woman who sat at her machine day after day, the other with
her sing-song repetition of the words, "How happy people ought to be who
can go to the country in such weather!" exasperated her almost beyond
endurance. The transparent blue of the sky, the soft summer air, made
all these miseries seem blacker and less endurable; in the same way that
the repose of Sunday, disturbed only by church-bells and the twitter of
the sparrows on the roofs, weighed painfully on her spirits. She thought
of her early life, of her drives and walks, of the gay parties in the
country, and above all of the more recent years at Etiolles. She thought
of D'Argenton reciting one of his poems on the porch in the moonlight.
Where was he? What was he doin