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Rh And then, what does it signify whether I am alone, or accompanied? nobody meddles with me".

"Taisez-vous, et asseyez-vous là—là!Shut up and sit there then! [sic]" Setting down a chair with emphasis in a particularly dull corner, before a series of most specially dreary "cadresframs [sic]".

"Mais, monsieur?But, sir? [sic]"

"Mais, mademoiselle, asseyez-vous, et ne bougez pas, entendez-vous? jusqu'à ce qu'on vienne vous chercher, ou que je vous donne la permissionBut, miss, sit down and do not move, do you hear? until we pick you up, or I give you permission [sic]".

"Quel triste coin!" cried I, "et quelles laids tableaux!and what ugly pictures! [sic]"

And, "laidsugly [sic]", indeed, they were, being a set of four, denominated in the catalog "La vie d'une femmeThe life of a woman [sic]". They were painted rather in a remarkable style, flat, dead, pale and formal. The first represented a "Jeune FilleYoung Girl [sic]", coming out of a church door, a missal in her hand, her dress very prim, her eyes cast down, her mouth pursed up—the image of a most villainous little precocious she-hypocrite. The second, a "MariéeBride [sic]", with a long white veil, kneeling at a prie-dieu in her chamber, holding her hands plastered together, finger to finger, and showing the whites of her eyes in a most exasperating manner. The third, a "Jeune MèreYoung Mother [sic]", hanging disconsolate over a clayey and puffy baby with a face like an unwholesome full moon. The fourth, a "Veuve", being a black woman, holding by the hand a black little girl, and the twain studiously surveying an elegant French monument, set up in a corner of some Père la Chaise. All these four "AngesAngels [sic]" were grim and gray as burglars, and cold and vapid as ghosts. What women to live with! insincere, ill-humored, bloodless, brainless nonentities! As bad in their way as the indolent gypsy-giantess, the Cleopatra, in hers.

It was impossible to keep one's attention long confined to these masterpieces, and so, by degrees, I veered round, and surveyed the gallery.

A perfect crowd of spectators was by this time gathered round the Lioness, from whose vicinage I had been banished; nearly half this crowd were ladies, but M. Paul afterwards told me, these were "des damesladies [sic]", and it was quite proper for them to contemplate what no "demoiselleyoung lady [sic]" ought to glance at. I assured him plainly I could not agree in this doctrine, and did not see the sense of it: whereupon, with his usual absolutism, he merely requested my silence, and also,