“It would have been, I am sure, most agreeable to the company to have a talent like yours put in requisition,” remarked Minard; “but those are not ideas that could ever come into the mind of that good Brigitte. She’d have seen two more candles to light. Five-franc pieces are her music. So, when la Peyrade and Thuillier insisted that she should move into the apartment in the Place de la Madeleine, she thought of nothing but the extra costs entailed by the removal. She judged, rightly enough, that beneath those gilded ceilings her old ‘penates’ might have a singular effect.” “See how all things link together,” remarked Phellion, “and how, from the summits of society, luxury infiltrates itself, sooner or later, through the lower classes, leading to the ruin of empires.” “You are broaching there, my dear commander,” said Minard, “one of the most knotty questions of political economy. Many good minds think, on the contrary, that luxury is absolutely demanded in the interests of commerce, which is certainly the life of States. In any case, this view, which isn’t yours, appears to have been that of Madame de Godollo, for, they tell me, her apartment is very coquettishly furnished; and to coax Mademoiselle Brigitte into the same path of elegance she made a proposal to her as follows: ‘A friend of mine,’ she said, ‘a Russian princess for whom one of the first upholsterers has just made splendid furniture, is suddenly recalled to Russia by the czar, a gentleman with whom no one dares to trifle. The poor woman is therefore obliged to turn everything she owns here into money as fast as possible; and I feel sure she would sell this furniture for ready money at a quarter of the price it cost her. All of it is nearly new, and some things have never been used at all.’” “So,” cried Madame Phellion, “all that magnificence displayed before our eyes last night was a magnificent economical bargain?” “Just so,” replied Minard; “and the thing that decided Mademoiselle Brigitte to take that splendid chance was not so much the desire to renew her shabby furniture as the idea of doing an excellent stroke of business. In that old maid there’s always something of Madame la Ressource in Moliere’s ‘Miser.’” “I think, Monsieur le maire, that you are mistaken,” said Phellion. “Madame la Ressource is a character in ‘Turcaret,’ a very immoral play by the late Le Sage.” “Do you think so?” said Minard. “Well, very likely. But what is certain is that, though the barrister ingratiated himself with Brigitte in helping her to buy the house, it was by this clever jockeying about the furniture that the foreign countess got upon the footing with Brigitte that you now see. You may have remarked, perhaps, that a struggle is going on between those two influences; which we may designate as the house, and its furniture.”