an exorbitant price, the owner, the real Madame Nourrisson,
an old-clothes buyer in the Rue Nueve Saint-Marc, had wisely appreciated
the great value of these kitchens, and had turned them into a sort of
dining-rooms. Each of these rooms, built between thick party-walls and
with windows to the street, was entirely shut in by very thick double
doors on the landing. Thus the most important secrets could be discussed
over a dinner, with no risk of being overheard. For greater security,
the windows had shutters inside and out. These rooms, in consequence of
this peculiarity, were let for twelve hundred francs a month. The
whole house, full of such paradises and mysteries was rented by Madame
Nourrisson the First for twenty-eight thousand francs of clear profit,
after paying her housekeeper, Madame Nourrisson the Second, for she did
not manage it herself.

The paradise let to Count Steinbock had been hung with chintz; the
cold, hard floor, of common tiles reddened with encaustic, was not
felt through a soft thick carpet. The furniture consisted of two pretty
chairs and a bed in an alcove, just now half hidden by a table loaded
with the remains of an elegant dinner, while two bottles with long
necks and an empty champagne-bottle in ice strewed the field of bacchus
cultivated by Venus.

There were also--the property, no doubt, of Valerie--a low easy-chair
and a man's smoking-chair, and a pretty toilet chest of drawers in
rosewood, the mirror handsomely framed _a la_ Pompadour. A lamp hanging
from the ceiling gave a subdued light, increased by wax candles on the
table and on the chimney-shelf.

This sketch will suffice to give an idea, _urbi et orbi_, of clandestine
passion in the squalid style stamped on it in Paris in 1840. How far,
alas! from the adulterous love, symbolized by Vulcan's nets, three
thousand years ago.

When Montes and Cydalise came upstairs, Valerie, standing before the
fire, where a log was blazing, was allowing Wenceslas to lace her stays.

This is a moment when a woman who is neither too fat nor too thin, but
like Valerie, elegant and slender, displays divine beauty. The rosy
skin, mostly soft, invites the sleepiest eye. The lines of her figure,
so little hidden, are so charmingly outlined by the white pleats of
the shift and the support of the stays, that she is irresistible--like
everything that must be parted from.

With a happy face smiling at the glass, a foot impatiently marking
time, a hand p