"I pose for him a good deal. And then I have much sewing to do. I take in sewing for Madame Deschamps, the deputy's wife, to help to make the ends meet. And then I read. Madame Deschamps lends me books."
"And I suppose you're bored to death?"
"Oh, no, I am not bored. I am happy. I never was really happy—dans le temps."
They were living in a very plain way indeed. You know what French farmhouses are apt to be. His whole income was under a hundred pounds a year; and out of that (and the trifle she earned by needlework) his canvases, colours, brushes, frames, had to be paid for, as well as his opium, and their food, clothing, everything. But P'tit-Bleu—Jeanne—with that "lower-middle-class parsimony" of hers, managed somehow. Jeanne! In putting off the name, she had put off also, in great measure, the attributes of P'tit-Bleu; she had become Jeanne in nature. She was grave, she was quiet. She wore the severest black frocks—she made them herself. And I never once noticed the odour of peau-d'Espagne, from the beginning to the end of my visit. But—shall I own it? Jeanne was certainly the more estimable of the two women, but shall I own that I found her far less exciting as a comrade than P'tit-Bleu had been? She was good, but she wasn't very lively or very amusing.
P'tit-Bleu, the heroine of Bullier's, that lover of noisy pleasure, of daring toilettes, of risky perfumes, of écrevisses and chablis, of all the rush and dissipation of the Boul'Miche and the Luxembourg, quietly settling down into Jeanne of the home-made frocks, in a rough French farmhouse, to a diet of veal and lentils, lentils and veal, seven times a week, and no other pastime in life than the devoted, untiring nursing of an ungrateful old English opium-eater here was variation under domestication with a vengeance.
And
