So have we arrived at the twilight of the once radiant Savoyarde’s career. She is sixty, and the golden hair has gone grey, and familiarly and affectionately she is known amongst her boarders as “Auntie.” Still, however, does she sew on the missing buttons of the _jeunesse_ of the Latin Quarter, and allow the _pension_ bills to stand over, and overlook the matter of broken washing-basins, and pacify the angry _blanchisseuse_, and encourage her struggling boarders with the old words of long ago: “Work hard, and make a name for yourself, and come and tell me of your fame....” Years roll on—and “Tante Marie” becomes deaf and frail, and holds a hand to her ear when the _pensionnaires_ of the past return to the Rue des Poitevins—elderly, many of them wealthy and distinguished—and pay her homage, and thank her emotionally for her kindnesses, and leave behind them autographed photographs bearing, amongst many other signatures, the names of Alphonse Daudet, François Coppée, Waldeck-Rousseau (Gambetta’s disciple), Reclus, the great physician, Millerand (ex-Minister of War), Pichon, the actual French Foreign Secretary, and a former President of the Republic, Émile Loubet.... More years roll by and “Tante Marie” becomes bent, shaky and wizened—a nonagenarian. Against her will, she is removed from the sombre, musty old Balzacian _pension_ to a small, modern, electric-lighted apartment—where she dies. Dies, in spite of her beauty, brilliancy, irresistibility, a spinster. Dies with the admission: “It was Gambetta I loved. Impossible, of course. But he called me a Greek Statue!” 3. PENSION DE FAMILLE. FRENCH AND PIANO LESSONS. LES SAINTES FILLES, MESDEMOISELLES PÉRIVIER Three years have elapsed since Henri Rochette, the dashing young French financier with the handsome black beard, fell with a crash. “Le Krach de Rochette. Arrest of the Financier. Millions of Losses. Ruin of Small Investors,” yelled the _camelots_ on the boulevards. It was another _affaire_, a gigantic swindle reminiscent of Panama, in that the greater part of the victims were small, thrifty people, who now stood in thousands outside Rochette’s closed, darkened offices, weeping, raging, pathetically or passionately demanding the return of their savings. “That Rochette, he came from nowhere—how did he manage it?” asked the prudent bourgeois, who had steeled himself against Rochette’s alluring, rattling circulars.