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Rh mother and son; but there was a salon, a sumptuous salon, a salon, to which everything had been sacrificed, a salon that enabled Mme. de la Vaudraye to declare, with pride:

"I have a salon."

And the townspeople nodded their heads in chorus:

"Mme. de la Vaudraye has a salon."

In so saying, they had in mind not only the costly furniture heaped up in that one room, but also the shining lights of the town who adorned it with their presence. You were really nobody at Domfront if you did not form part of the salon of Mme. de la Vaudraye.

In its essence and as Gilberte saw it, the salon consisted of an old-oak chest and an Empire sideboard, of the Bottentuit and Charmeron couples and their five young ladies, of M. and Mme. Lartiste and their son, of Mlle. du Bocage, of M. Beaufrelant, M. Hourteulx and Messrs. Simare, father