A fortnight after her husband's death, Fanny was installed in small and unpretentious apartments in the upper part of Faubourg Poissonniere. With her dowry of twenty thousand francs, the proceeds of the sale of her furniture, horses, and carriages, and the sum which she had made by speculating in railway and other shares, the young widow had an income of about twenty-five hundred francs. That was very little, when compared with the handsome fortune she had enjoyed for a moment, but it was enough to enable a woman who was a skilful manager to live comfortably. Monsieur Gerbault had suggested to the young widow that she should come to live with him and her sister, as she had done before her marriage, but Fanny had refused; she preferred to remain free; and then, too, in all probability, she cherished some hopes for the future, and as she looked at her reflection in her mirror,--for she had retained enough of her furniture to furnish her new abode handsomely,--the pretty creature said to herself that plenty of aspirants to the honor of putting an end to her widowhood would surely come forward; and that, by living alone, she would be more at liberty and better able to choose. As for the deceased, his suicide had been the sensation of the Bourse and of society for a week; a fortnight later, it was rarely mentioned, and at the end of a month everybody had forgotten it. But, no: there was one person who often thought of him, to deplore his melancholy end, to regret that fortune had been so cruel to that young man, who, for his part, had treated fortune too cavalierly when she smiled on him. That person was not his widow, but her sister Adolphine. The poor child had at first felt terribly ashamed because she had betrayed the deep interest she felt in Gustave; but she was unable to control the emotion which had seized her when she thought that Cherami had come to inform her of his death. Later, when she knew the truth, she had wept a long while over Auguste's death; then she had hurried to her sister, to comfort her, to mingle her own tears with hers; but she had found Fanny much more engrossed by her pecuniary affairs than by the loss of her husband. Finally, as the young widow found that her sister came to see her every day, and that she persisted in talking about Auguste and shedding abundant tears to his memory, she said to her one day: