IN THE HOTEL DE LA MOLE
281
Ii
tout pour adoucir son sort,
Ii
livrer Georges ou Pichegru, si Georges ou
Pichegru etaient encore
Ii
livrer. Neanmoins elle est
bonne femme au
fond,
disent Les pensionnaires, qui fa croient sans fortune en L'entendant
geindre et tousser comme eux. Qu'avait ete M. Vauquer? Elle ne
s'expLiquait jamais sur Le defunt. Comment avait-iL perdu sa fortune?
"Dans les malheurs," repondait-elle. Il s'etait mal conduit envers eUe,
ne lui avait laisse que Les yeux pour pleurer, cette maison pour vivre, et
le droit de ne compatir
Ii
aucune infortune, parce que, disait-elle, eUe
avait souffert tout ce qu'il est possible de souffrir.
The portrait of the hostess is connected with her morning ap–
pearance in the dining-room; she appears in thjs center of her in–
fluence, the cat jumping onto the buffet before her gives a touch of
witchcraft to her entrance; and then Balzac immediately begins a
detailed description of her person. The description is controlled by a
leading motif, which
is
several times repeated-the motif of the
harmony between Madame Vauquer's person on the one hand and
the room in which she is present, the pension which she directs, and
the life which she leads, on the other; in short, the harmony between
her person and what we (and Balzac too, occasionally) call her
milieu. This harmony
is
most impressively suggested: first through
the dilapidation, the greasiness, the dirtiness and warmth, the sexual
repulsiveness of her body and her clothes--all this being in harmony
with the
air
of the room which she breathes without disgust; a
little later, in connection with her face and its expressions, the motif
is conceived somewhat more ethically, and with even greater em–
phasis upon the complementary relation between the person and
the milieu:
usa personne explique la pension, comme La pension
implique sa personne";
with this goes the comparison to the prison.
There follows a more medical concept, in which Madame Vauquer's
uembonpoint blafard"
as a symptom of her life is compared to ty–
phoid as the result of the exhalations of a hospital. Finally her
petticoat is appraised as a sort of synthesis of the various rooms of
the pension, as a foretaste of the products of the kitchen, and as a
premonition of the guests; for a moment her petticoat becomes a
symbol of the milieu, and then the whole is epitomized again in the
sentence:
uQuand eUe est la, ce spectacle est complet"--one
need,
then, wait no longer for the breakfast and the guests, they are all
included
in
her person. There seems to be no deliberate order for
