Two rooms, a dining-room, and a kitchen, where the glued chairs were moved from room to room according to requirements, formed all the flat that Madame Caravan spent all her time cleaning, while her daughter Marie Louise, aged twelve, and her son Philip Augustus, aged nine, ran loose in the gutters of the avenue, with all the urchins of the district.

Above him, Caravan had installed his mother, whose greed was celebrated in the neighbourhood, and whose thinness gave rise to the saying that the ‘good God’ had practised on her her own principles of parsimony. Always in a bad temper, she never let a day pass without quarrels and furious bursts of rage. She apostrophized from her window the neighbours on their doorsteps, the vegetable dealers, the street sweepers, and the street boys, who, to avenge themselves, followed her from afar when she went out, shouting, ‘Here’s another guy!’

A small servant-girl from Normandy, incredibly stupid, did the housework, and slept on the second story, near the old lady, for fear of accident.

When Caravan entered his home, his wife, attacked by her chronic malady of house-cleaning, was polishing with a bit of flannel the mahogany of the chairs scattered thinly in the solitude of the rooms.

She always wore thread gloves, adorned her head with a bonnet with many-coloured ribbons perpetually slipping over an ear, and she would repeat, any time that anybody surprised her waxing, brushing, polishing, or washing:

‘I am not rich, in my house everything is simple, but cleanliness is my luxury, and that’s just as good a one as any other.’

Gifted with a self-willed, practical good sense, she was in everything her husband’s guide. Every evening at table, and later on in their bed, they chatted at length about office business, and although she was twenty years younger than he, he confided in her as in a director of conscience, and followed all her advice.

She had never been pretty: she was ugly now, little and thinnish. The want of skill she showed in dressing had always hidden the feeble feminine attributes, which should artfully have come to light with a well chosen style of attire. Her skirts seemed perpetually twisted on one side: and she scratched herself often, no matter where, with absolute indifference as to who was present, through a sort of mania which was almost a disease.

The only ornament she allowed herself consisted in a profusion of twisted silk ribbons on the pretentious bonnets she was accustomed to wear in the house.

As soon as she saw her husband, she rose, and kissing him on his whiskers: ‘Did you remember Potin, my dear?’ (this referred to an errand he had promised to do). But he fell aghast on a seat: he had just forgotten it again for the fourth time.

‘There’s a fate in it!’ he said, ‘there’s a fate in it; it’s no use my thinking about it all the day; when the evening comes, I always forget.’ But, as he seemed distressed, she consoled him.

‘You’ll remember about it to-morrow, that’s all. Nothing new at the Ministry?’

‘Yes, great news; still another tinman nominated underchief.’

She became very serious.

‘To what office?’

‘The Office of Foreign Purchases.’