They were living in a very plain way indeed. You know what French farmhouses are apt to be. His whole income was under a hundred pounds a year; and out of that (and the trifle she earned by needlework) his canvases, colours, brushes, frames, had to be paid for, as well as his opium, and their food, clothing, everything. But P’tit-Bleu—Jeanne—with that “lower-middle-class parsimony” of hers, managed somehow. Jeanne! In putting off the name, she had put off also, in great measure, the attributes of P’tit-Bleu; she had become Jeanne in nature. She was grave, she was quiet. She wore the severest black frocks—she made them herself. And I never once noticed the odour of peau-d’.spagne, from the beginning to the end of my visit. But—shall I own it? Jeanne was certainly the more estimable of the two women, but shall I own that I found her far less exciting as a comrade than P’tit-Bleu had been? She was good, but she wasn’t very lively or very amusing. P’tit-Bleu, the heroine of Bullier, that lover of noisy pleasure, of daring toilettes, of risky perfumes, of écrevisses and chablis, of all the rush and dissipation of the Boul’ Miche and the Luxembourg, quietly settling down into Jeanne of the home-made frocks, in a rough French farmhouse, to a diet of veal and lentils, lentils and veal, seven times a week, and no other pastime in life than the devoted, untiring nursing of an ungrateful old English opium-eater—here was variation under domestication with a vengeance. And on Sunday... P’tit-Bleu went twice to church! About ten days after my return to Paris, there came a rat-ta-ta-tat at my door, and P’tit-BIeu walked in—pale, with wide eyes. “I don’t know how he has contrived it, but he must have got some money somewhere, and walked to the railway, and come to town. Anyhow, here are three days that he has disappeared. What to do? What to do?” She was in a deplorable state of mind, poor thing, and I scarcely knew how to help her. I proposed that we should take counsel with a Commissary of Police. But when that functionary discovered that she was neither the wife nor daughter of the missing man, he smiled, and remarked, “It is not our business to recover ladies’ protectors for them.” P’tit-BIeu walked the streets in quest of him, all day long and very nearly all night long too, for close upon a fortnight. In the end, she met him on the quays—dazed, half-imbecile, and again nude of everything save his shirt and trousers. So, again, having nicely built up her house of cards—piff!—something had happened to topple it over. “Let him go to the devil his own way,” said I. “Really, he’s unworthy of your pains.” “No, I can’t leave him. You see, I’m fond of him,” said she.