All are anxious to be received at Marie-Thérèse. The poor women who are obliged to leave when they have recovered their health take up their lodgings near the Infirmary, in the hope of falling ill again and returning to it. Nothing smacks of the hospital: the Jewess, the Protestant, the Catholic, the foreigner, the Frenchwoman receive the cares of a delicate charity disguising itself as an affectionate relationship; each afflicted woman seems to have found her mother. I have seen a Spaniard, beautiful as Dorothea the "Pearl of Seville," die at sixteen of consumption, in the common dormitory, congratulating herself upon her happiness, looking as she smiled, with great, black, half-dimmed eyes, a pale and emaciated face, at Madame la Dauphine, who asked after her and assured her that she would soon be well. She expired that same evening, far from the Mosque of Cordova and the banks of the Guadalquivir, her native stream: "'What are you?' "'A Spaniard.' "'A Spaniard and here[504]!'" We have many widows of knights of the Holy Ghost among our frequenters; they bring with them the only thing that remains to them, the portraits of their husbands in the uniform of a captain of foot: a white coat with rose-pink or sky-blue facings, with their hair dressed _à l'oiseau royal._ They are put in the lumber-room. I cannot look at the regiment of them without laughing: if the Old Monarchy had survived, I should to-day be adding to the number of those portraits, I should be acting as the solace of my grand-nephews in some deserted gallery: "That's your great-uncle François, the captain in the Navarre Regiment: he was a very witty man! He wrote the riddle in the _Mercure_ beginning with the words, 'Cut off my head,' and the fugitive poem, in the _Almanach des Muses_, called the _Cri du cœur._" When I am tired of my gardens, the plain of Montrouge takes their place. I have seen that plain change: what have I not seen change! Twenty-five years ago, I used to pass by the Barrière du Maine when going to Méréville, to the Marais, to the Vallée aux Loups; to the right and left of the road one saw only mills, the wheels of the cranes at the stone-pits and the nursery-garden of Cels, Rousseau's old friend. Desnoyers built his rooms of a "hundred covers" for the soldiers of the Imperial Guard, who came to clink glasses between each battle won, each kingdom overthrown. A few public-houses stood round the mills, from the Barrière du Maine to the Barrière du Montparnasse. Higher up were the _Moulin janséniste_ and Lauzun's pleasure-house, by way of a contrast. Near the public-houses, acacias were planted, the poor man's shade, even as seltzer-water is the beggar's champagne. A travelling theatre fixed the migratory population of the public-house balls; a village was formed with a paved street, song-writers and gendarmes, the Amphions and Cecropses of the police.