It was certainly true that Madame, in spite of her apparent elegance and her very pretty face, had queer manners and vulgar habits that were very disagreeable. The dirty creature was fond of boiled beef, and bacon and cabbage; and, like the cabmen, it was her delight to pour red wine into her soup. I was ashamed of her. Often, in her quarrels with Monsieur, her anger stirred the mud that still remained in the depths of her being, not yet thoroughly cleaned by her suddenly-acquired luxury, and brought up to her lips a filthy foam of words,--ah! words that I, who am not a lady, often regret having uttered. But there you are! One does not imagine how many women there are, with angels' mouths, and starry eyes, and three-thousand-franc dresses, who, in their own houses, use coarse language, make filthy gestures, and are disgusting by their vulgarity,--in fact, strumpets of the lowest type. "Great ladies," said William, "are like the best sauces,--it is better not to know how they are made." William was given to these disenchanting aphorisms. And, being all the same a very gallant man, he added, as he took me about the waist: "A little girl like you is less flattering to a lover's vanity. But she is more serious, all the same." I must say that Madame spent all her wrath and showered all her coarse words upon Monsieur; with us, I repeat, she was rather timid. Moreover, amid the disorder of her house, amid all the reckless waste she tolerated, Madame showed queer streaks of avarice that were quite unexpected. She higgled with the cook over two sous spent for salad, economized in the matter of the servants' washing, raised objections to a bill of three francs, and did not rest until, after endless complaints and correspondence, and interminable negotiations, she had secured a refunding of fifteen centimes unwarrantably collected by an expressman for the transportation of a package. Every time she took a cab, there was a quarrel with the coachman, to whom she gave no tip, and whom she even found a way of cheating. And yet she left her money about everywhere, with her jewels and her keys, on the mantels and on the furniture. She recklessly ruined her richest costumes and her finest linen, she suffered herself to be impudently robbed by dealers in articles of luxury, and accepted with without a frown the books of the old butler, as Monsieur, for that matter, accepted those of William. And yet God knows what frauds they contained! Sometimes I said to William: "Really, you pinch too much; some day you will get into trouble." To which William replied, very calmly: "Oh! let me alone; I know what I am about, and how far I can go. When one has masters as stupid as these are, it would be a crime not to take advantage of them." But the poor fellow scarcely profited by these continual larcenies, which, in spite of the astonishing tips he had, continually went to fill the pockets of the bookmakers.