＜p＞They both styled themselves "Madame," but only the younger of the old ladies had been married. Madame Vali?re was still a demoiselle, but as she drew towards sixty it had seemed more convenable to possess a mature label. Certainly Madame D?pine had no visible matrimonial advantages over her fellow-lodger at the H?tel des Tourterelles, though in the symmetrical cemetery of Montparnasse (Section 22) wreaths of glass beads testified to a copious domesticity in the far past, and a newspaper picture of a chasseur d'Afrique pinned over her bed recalledーthough only the uniform was the dead soldier'sーthe son she had contributed to France's colonial empire. Practically it was two old maidsーor two lone widowsーwhose boots turned pointed toes towards each Other in the dark cranny of the rambling, fusty corridor of the sky-floor. Madame D?pine was round, and grew dumpier with age; "Madame" Vali?re was long, and grew slimmer. Otherwise their lives ran parallel. For the true madame of the establishment you had to turn to Madame la Propri?taire, with her buxom bookkeeper of a daughter and her tame baggage-bearing husband. This full-blooded, jovial creature, with her swart moustache, represented the only Parisian success of three provincial lives, and, in her good-nature, had permitted her decayed townswomenーat as low a rent as was compatible with prudenceーto shelter themselves under her roof and as near it as possible. Her house being a profitable warren of American art-students, tempered by native journalists and decadent poets, she could, moreover, afford to let the old ladies off coffee and candles. They were at liberty to prepare their own d?jeuner in winter or to buy it outside in summer; they could burn their own candles or sit in the dark, as the heart in them pleased; and thus they were as cheaply niched as any one in the gay city. Renti?res after their meticulous fashion, they drew a ridiculous but regular amount from the mysterious coffers of the Cr?dit Lyonnais. But though they met continuously in the musty corridor, and even dinedーwhen they did dineーat the same cr?merie, they never spoke to each Other. Madame la Propri?taire was the channel through which they sucked each Other's history, for though they had both known her in their girlish days at Tonnerre, in the department of Yonne, they had not known each Other. Madame Vali?re (Madame D?pine learnt, and it seemed to explain the frigidity of her neighbour's manner) still trailed clouds of glory from the service of a Princess a quarter of a century before. Her refusal to wink at the Princess's goings-on, her austere, if provincial, regard for the convenances, had cost her the place, and from these purpureal heights she had fallen lower and lower, till she struck the attic of the H?tel des Tourterelles. But even a haloed past does not give one a licence to annoy one's neighbours. Madame D?pine felt resentfully, and she hated Madame Vali?re as a haughty minion of royalty, who kept a cough, which barked loudest in the silence of the night. "Why doesn't she go to the hospital, your Princess?" she complained to Madame la Propri?taire. "Since she is able to nurse herself at home," the opulent-bosomed hostess replied with a shrug＜/p＞画面が切り替わりますので、しばらくお待ち下さい。
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