This room is in all its glory at about seven in the morning when Madame Vauquer’s cat appears downstairs, a sign that his mistress is on the way. He jumps on the sideboards and sniffs at the plates covering several bowls of milk and purrs his morning greeting to the world. Soon the widow makes her appearance, adorned with her tulle cap perched on top of a false front set crooked on her head, and shuffles about in creased slippers. Her ageing puffy face dominated by a nose like a parrot’s beak, her dimpled little hands, her body as plump as a church rat’s, her bunchy shapeless dress are in their proper setting in this room where misery oozes from the walls and hope, trodden down and stifled, has yielded to despair. Madame Vauquer is at home in its stuffy air, she can breathe without being sickened by it. Her face, fresh with the chill freshness of the first frosty autumn day, her wrinkled eyes, her expression, varying from the conventional set smile of the ballet- dancer to the sour frown of the discounter of bills, her whole person, in short, provides a clue to the boarding-house, just as the boarding-house implies the existence of such a person as she is. There is no prison without its warder; you cannot conceive of the one without the other. The unwholesome plumpness of this little woman is a product of the life she lives here, by the same process that breeds typhoid fever from the noxious vapours of a hospital. Her knitted woollen petticoat dipping below the refurbished old dress which forms her skirt, its wadding escaping from rents in the ripped material, expresses the essence of the sitting-room, the dining-room and the little garden, makes you realize what the kitchen must be like, and foreshadows the boarders. When she is there the picture is complete.

Madame Vauquer is about fifty years old, and she resembles all women who have had a peck of troubles. She has the glassy eye and innocent air of a procuress ready with a show of virtuous indignation to squeeze a client for some extra payment, and she is, in fact, ready to lend herself to any shift that may make her path in life smoother, to betray Georges or Pichegcu, if those generals were still hiding from Napoleon and could be betrayed. All the same she is a good woman at heart. So say the lodgers who believe her to be badly off when they hear her cough and groan like one of them- selves. What had Monsieur Vauquer been? She never entered into explanations about her late husband. How had he lost his money? ‘Mishap and misfortune,’ was her answer. He had treated her badly, had left her only her eyes to weep with, the house to live in and the right to withhold her sympathy from anyone in trouble because, as she said, she knew what real trouble was, she had suffered all that a woman could.