I advanced two paces and stood looking about me in angry bewilderment. The bareness of extreme poverty marked everything on which my eyes rested. A cracked earthenware lamp smoked and sputtered on a stool in the middle of the rotting floor. An old black cloak nailed to the wall, and flapping to and fro in the draught like some dead gallowsbird, hung in front of the unglazed window. A jar in a corner caught the drippings from a hole in the roof. An iron pot and a second stool--the latter casting a long shadow across the floor--stood beside the handful of wood ashes, which smouldered on the hearth. And that was all the furniture I saw, except a bed which filled the farther end of the long narrow room, and was curtained off so as to form a kind of miserable alcove. A glance sufficed to show me all this, and that the room was empty, or apparently empty. Yet I looked again and again, stupefied. At last finding my voice, I turned to the young man who had brought us hither, and with a fierce oath demanded of him what he meant. He shrank back behind the open door, and yet; answered with a kind of sullen surprise that I had asked for Madame de Bonne’s, and this was it. ‘Madame de Bonne’s!’ I muttered. ‘This Madame de Bonne’s!’ He nodded. ‘Of course it is! And you know it!’ mademoiselle hissed in my ear, her voice, as she interposed, hoarse with passion. ‘Don’t think that you can deceive us any longer. We know all! This,’ she continued, looking round, her cheeks scarlet, her eyes ablaze with scorn, ‘is your mother’s, is it! Your mother who has followed the court hither--whose means are narrow, but not so small as to deprive her of the privileges of her rank! This is your mother’s hospitality, is it? You are a cheat, sir! and a detected cheat! Let us begone! Let me go, sir, I say!’ Twice I had tried to stop the current of her words; but in vain. Now with anger which surpassed hers a hundredfold--for who, being a man, would hear himself misnamed before his mother?--I succeeded, ‘Silence, mademoiselle!’ I cried, my grasp on her wrist. ‘Silence, I say! This is my mother!’ And running forward to the bed, I fell on my knees beside it. A feeble hand had half withdrawn the curtain, and through the gap my mother’s stricken face looked out, a great fear stamped upon it. CHAPTER VII. SIMON FLEIX