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 a dark man with a patriarchal beard, the sole reminder of Mme. Choiseul's one moment of bliss. Madame had two egos; one of them endlessly aspired, the other took its twin by the hand and led it to disaster. For every will o' the wisp in her life there had been a substantial bog. As a little girl she had been obsessed with a desire to be able to blow her nose as mightily as the farmer who sat ahead of her in church, in her native Luxembourg, and with that lamentable object in view she had tried to enlarge her nose by filling it every day with cherry pits. One day, after she had established a record, one of the pits declined to come out. It had got lost under the bridge, but soon revealed its whereabouts by raising a lump like a radish, and the little girl had to be taken to the doctor to have the pit extracted, then to the cure to be admonished for her vanity, and all these trials had left her still unable to rival the farmer in church.

Her whole life had been like that. At the age of seventeen she had come to Paris and entered a milliner's shop from which she had been honorably rescued by the proprietor of a doubtful hotel, whom she married not because she loved him but because she was afraid he might kill her if she didn't. After fifteen years of oppression he died and left her a little money of which she was slowly but surely bereft by her men of affairs. She set up a pension of her own, but her pensionnaires neglected to pay their bills, finding it more to their purpose to borrow her money. She