andles, for the careful housewife lighted the
room with a tall tallow candle always guttering down into the flat brass
candlestick which held it. Madame Saillard's face, despite its wrinkles,
was expressive of obstinacy and severity, narrowness of ideas, an
uprightness that might be called quadrangular, a religion without piety,
straightforward, candid avarice, and the peace of a quiet conscience.
You may see in certain Flemish pictures the wives of burgomasters cut
out by nature on the same pattern and wonderfully reproduced on canvas;
but these dames wear fine robes of velvet and precious stuffs, whereas
Madame Saillard possessed no robes, only that venerable garment called
in Touraine and Picardy "cottes," elsewhere petticoats, or skirts
pleated behind and on each side, with other skirts hanging over them.
Her bust was inclosed in what was called a "casaquin," another obsolete
name for a short gown or jacket. She continued to wear a cap with
starched wings, and shoes with high heels. Though she was now
fifty-seven years old, and her lifetime of vigorous household work ought
now to be rewarded with well-earned repose, she was incessantly employed
in knitting her husband's stockings and her own, and those of an uncle,
just as her countrywomen knit them, moving about the room, talking,
pacing up and down the garden, or looking round the kitchen to watch
what was going on.

The Saillard's avarice, which was really imposed on them in the first
instance by dire necessity, was now a second nature. When the cashier
got back from the office, he laid aside his coat, and went to work in
the large garden, shut off from the courtyard by an iron railing, and
which the family reserved to itself. For years Elisabeth, the daughter,
went to market every morning with her mother, and the two did all
the work of the house. The mother cooked well, especially a duck with
turnips; but, according to Saillard, no one could equal Elisabeth in
hashing the remains of a leg of mutton with onions. "You might eat
your boots with those onions and not know it," he remarked. As soon
as Elisabeth knew how to hold a needle, her mother had her mend the
household linen and her father's coats. Always at work, like a servant,
she never went out alone. Though living close by the boulevard du
Temple, where Franconi, La Gaite, and l'Ambigu-Comique were within a
stone's throw, and, further on, the Porte-Saint-Martin, Elisabeth had
never seen a comedy. When she