Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/99

 charcutière in the Rue de Clichy, had found in the wadding of an old petticoat the sum of three hundred and sixty francs, which she had lost five years before. He pronounced his words with great pomp and circumstance, and Newman assured him that his way of dealing with the French tongue was very superior to the bewildering chatter that he heard in other mouths. Upon this M. Nioche's accent became more flutelike than ever; he offered to read extracts from Lamartine and protested that, although he did endeavour according to his feeble lights to cultivate authority of diction, monsieur, if he wanted the real thing, should go to the Comédie.

Newman took an interest in the wondrous French thrift and conceived a lively admiration for Parisian economies. His own economic genius was so entirely for operations on a larger scale, and, to move at his ease, he needed so imperatively the sense of great risks and great prizes, that he found diversion akin to the watching of ants in the spectacle of fortunes made by the aggregation of copper coins and in the minute subdivision of labour and profit. He questioned M. Nioche about his own manner of life and felt a friendly mixture of compassion and respect for the mystery of these humilities. The worthy man told him how he and his daughter had at one period supported existence comfortably on the sum of fifteen sous per diem; recently, having succeeded in dragging ashore the last floating fragments of the wreck of his fortune, his budget had been a trifle more ample. But they still had to butter their bread very thin, and M. Nioche intimated with a sigh that 69