Well! grandeur and splendour hardly dazzled this courageous old lady. She did not go into ecstasies over gilding and petty baubles, and as she walked up the grand staircase behind her trunk, the baskets of flowers on the landings, the lamps held by bronze statues, did not prevent her from noticing that there was an inch of dust on the balustrade, and holes in the carpet. She was taken to the rooms on the second floor belonging to the Levantine and her children; and there, in an apartment used as a linen-room, which seemed to be near the school-room (to judge by the murmur of children’s voices), she waited alone, her basket on her knees, for the return of her Bernard, perhaps the waking of her daughter-in-law, or the great joy of embracing her grandchildren. What she saw around her gave her an idea of the disorder of this house left to the care of the servants, without the oversight and foreseeing activity of a mistress. The linen was heaped in disorder, piles on piles in great wide-open cupboards, fine linen sheets and table-cloths crumpled up, the locks prevented from shutting by pieces of torn lace, which no one took the trouble to mend. And yet there were many servants about--negresses in yellow Madras muslin, who came to snatch here a towel, there a table-cloth, walking among the scattered domestic treasures, dragging with their great flat feet frills of fine lace from a petticoat which some lady’s-maid had thrown down--thimble here, scissors there--ready to pick up again in a few minutes. Jansoulet’s mother was doubly wounded. The half-rustic artisan in her was outraged in the tenderness, the respect, the sweet unreasonableness the woman of the provinces feels towards a full linen cupboard--a cupboard filled piece by piece, full of relics of past struggles, whose contents grow finer little by little, the first token of comfort, of wealth, in the house. Besides, she had held the distaff from morning till night, and if the housewife in her was angry, the spinner could have wept at the profanation. At last, unable to contain herself longer, she rose, and actively, her little shawl displaced at each movement, she set herself to pick up, straighten, and carefully fold this magnificent linen, as she used to do in the fields of Saint-Romans, when she gave herself the treat of a grand washing-day, with twenty washerwomen, the clothes-baskets flowing over with floating whiteness, and the sheets flapping in the morning wind on the clothes-lines. She was in the midst of this occupation, forgetting her journey, forgetting Paris, even the place where she was, when a stout, thick-set, bearded man, with varnished boots and a velvet jacket, over the torso of a bull, came into the linen-room. “What! Cabassu!” “You here, Mme. Francoise! What a surprise!” said the _masseur_, staring like a bronze figure. “Yes, my brave Cabassu, it is I. I have just arrived; and as you see, I am at work already. It made my heart bleed to see all this muddle.”