________________________________________________
_ This was the end of Sophia's romantic adventures in France. Soon
afterwards the Germans entered Paris, by mutual agreement, and
made a point of seeing the Louvre, and departed, amid the silence
of a city. For Sophia the conclusion of the siege meant chiefly
that prices went down. Long before supplies from outside could
reach Paris, the shop-windows were suddenly full of goods which
had arrived from the shopkeepers alone knew where. Sophia, with
the stock in her cellar, could have held out for several weeks
more, and it annoyed her that she had not sold more of her good
things while good things were worth gold. The signing of a treaty
at Versailles reduced the value of Sophia's two remaining hams
from about five pounds apiece to the usual price of hams. However,
at the end of January she found herself in possession of a capital
of about eight thousand francs, all the furniture of the flat, and
a reputation. She had earned it all. Nothing could destroy the
structure of her beauty, but she looked worn and appreciably
older. She wondered often when Chirac would return. She might have
written to Carlier or to the paper; but she did not. It was Niepce
who discovered in a newspaper that Chirac's balloon had
miscarried. At the moment the news did not affect her at all; but
after several days she began to feel her loss in a dull sort of
way; and she felt it more and more, though never acutely. She was
perfectly convinced that Chirac could never have attracted her
powerfully. She continued to dream, at rare intervals, of the kind
of passion that would have satisfied her, glowing but banked down
like a fire in some fine chamber of a rich but careful household.
She was speculating upon what her future would be, and whether by
inertia she was doomed to stay for ever in the Rue Breda, when the
Commune caught her. She was more vexed than frightened by the
Commune; vexed that a city so in need of repose and industry
should indulge in such antics. For many people the Commune was a
worse experience than the siege; but not for Sophia. She was a
woman and a foreigner. Niepce was infinitely more disturbed than
Sophia; he went in fear of his life. Sophia would go out to market
and take her chances. It is true that during one period the whole
population of the house went to live in the cellars, and orders to
the butcher and other tradesmen were given over the party-wall
into the adjoining courtyard, which communicated with an alley. A
strange existence, and possibly perilous! But the women who passed
through it and had also passed through the siege, were not very
much intimidated by it, unless they happened to have husbands or
lovers who were active politicians.
Sophia did not cease, during the greater part of the year 1871, to
make a living and to save money. She watched every sou, and she
developed a tendency to demand from her tenants all that they
could pay. She excused this to herself by ostentatiously declaring
every detail of her prices in advance. It came to the same thing
in the end, with this advantage, that the bills did not lead to
unpleasantness. Her difficulties commenced when Paris at last
definitely resumed its normal aspect and life, when all the women
and children came back to those city termini which they had left
in such huddled, hysterical throngs, when flats were re-opened
that had long been shut, and men who for a whole year had had the
disadvantages and the advantages of being without wife and family,
anchored themselves once more to the hearth. Then it was that
Sophia failed to keep all her rooms let. She could have let them
easily and constantly and at high rents; but not to men without
encumbrances. Nearly every day she refused attractive tenants in
pretty hats, or agreeable gentlemen who only wanted a room on
condition that they might offer hospitality to a dashing
petticoat. It was useless to proclaim aloud that her house was
'serious.' The ambition of the majority of these joyous persons
was to live in a 'serious' house, because each was sure that at
bottom he or she was a 'serious' person, and quite different from
the rest of the joyous world. The character of Sophia's flat,
instead of repelling the wrong kind of aspirant, infallibly drew
just that kind. Hope was inextinguishable in these bosoms. They
heard that there would be no chance for them at Sophia's; but they
tried nevertheless. And occasionally Sophia would make a mistake,
and grave unpleasantness would occur before the mistake could be
rectified. The fact was that the street was too much for her. Few
people would credit that there was a serious boarding-house in the
Rue Breda. The police themselves would not credit it. And Sophia's
beauty was against her. At that time the Rue Breda was perhaps the
most notorious street in the centre of Paris; at the height of its
reputation as a warren of individual improprieties; most busily
creating that prejudice against itself which, over thirty years
later, forced the authorities to change its name in obedience to
the wish of its tradesmen. When Sophia went out at about eleven
o'clock in the morning with her reticule to buy, the street was
littered with women who had gone out with reticules to buy. But
whereas Sophia was fully dressed, and wore headgear, the others
were in dressing-gown and slippers, or opera-cloak and slippers,
having slid directly out of unspeakable beds and omitted to brush
their hair out of their puffy eyes. In the little shops of the Rue
Breda, the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, and the Rue des Martyrs, you
were very close indeed to the primitive instincts of human nature.
It was wonderful; it was amusing; it was excitingly picturesque;
and the universality of the manners rendered moral indignation
absurd. But the neighbourhood was certainly not one in which a
woman of Sophia's race, training, and character, could comfortably
earn a living, or even exist. She could not fight against the
entire street. She, and not the street, was out of place and in
the wrong. Little wonder that the neighbours lifted their
shoulders when they spoke of her! What beautiful woman but a mad
Englishwoman would have had the idea of establishing herself in
the Rue Breda with the intention of living like a nun and
compelling others to do the same?
By dint of continual ingenuity, Sophia contrived to win somewhat
more than her expenses, but she was slowly driven to admit to
herself that the situation could not last.
Then one day she saw in Galignani's Messenger an advertisement of
an English pension for sale in the Rue Lord Byron, in the Champs
Elysees quarter. It belonged to some people named Frensham, and
had enjoyed a certain popularity before the war. The proprietor
and his wife, however, had not sufficiently allowed for the
vicissitudes of politics in Paris. Instead of saving money during
their popularity they had put it on the back and on the fingers of
Mrs. Frensham. The siege and the Commune had almost ruined them.
With capital they might have restored themselves to their former
pride; but their capital was exhausted. Sophia answered the
advertisement. She impressed the Frenshams, who were delighted
with the prospect of dealing in business with an honest English
face. Like many English people abroad they were most strangely
obsessed by the notion that they had quitted an island of honest
men to live among thieves and robbers. They always implied that
dishonesty was unknown in Britain. They offered, if she would take
over the lease, to sell all their furniture and their renown for
ten thousand francs. She declined, the price seeming absurd to
her. When they asked her to name a price, she said that she
preferred not to do so. Upon entreaty, she said four thousand
francs. They then allowed her to see that they considered her to
have been quite right in hesitating to name a price so ridiculous.
And their confidence in the honest English face seemed to have
been shocked. Sophia left. When she got back to the Rue Breda she
was relieved that the matter had come to nothing. She did not
precisely foresee what her future was to be, but at any rate she
knew she shrank from the responsibility of the Pension Frensham.
The next morning she received a letter offering to accept six
thousand. She wrote and declined. She was indifferent and she
would not budge from four thousand. The Frenshams gave way. They
were pained, but they gave way. The glitter of four thousand
francs in cash, and freedom, was too tempting.
Thus Sophia became the proprietress of the Pension Frensham in the
cold and correct Rue Lord Byron. She made room in it for nearly
all her other furniture, so that instead of being under-furnished,
as pensions usually are, it was over-furnished. She was extremely
timid at first, for the rent alone was four thousand francs a
year; and the prices of the quarter were alarmingly different from
those of the Rue Breda. She lost a lot of sleep. For some nights,
after she had been installed in the Rue Lord Byron about a
fortnight, she scarcely slept at all, and she ate no more than she
slept. She cut down expenditure to the very lowest, and frequently
walked over to the Rue Breda to do her marketing. With the aid of
a charwoman at six sous an hour she accomplished everything. And
though clients were few, the feat was in the nature of a miracle;
for Sophia had to cook.
The articles which George Augustus Sala wrote under the title
"Paris herself again" ought to have been paid for in gold by the
hotel and pension-keepers of Paris. They awakened English
curiosity and the desire to witness the scene of terrible events.
Their effect was immediately noticeable. In less than a year after
her adventurous purchase, Sophia had acquired confidence, and she
was employing two servants, working them very hard at low wages.
She had also acquired the landlady's manner. She was known as Mrs.
Frensham. Across the balconies of two windows the Frenshams had
left a gilded sign, "Pension Frensham," and Sophia had not removed
it. She often explained that her name was not Frensham; but in
vain. Every visitor inevitably and persistently addressed her
according to the sign. It was past the general comprehension that
the proprietress of the Pension Frensham might bear another name
than Frensham. But later there came into being a class of persons,
habitues of the Pension Frensham, who knew the real name of the
proprietress and were proud of knowing it, and by this knowledge
were distinguished from the herd. What struck Sophia was the
astounding similarity of her guests. They all asked the same
questions, made the same exclamations, went out on the same
excursions, returned with the same judgments, and exhibited the
same unimpaired assurance that foreigners were really very
peculiar people. They never seemed to advance in knowledge. There
was a constant stream of explorers from England who had to be set
on their way to the Louvre or the Bon Marche.
Sophia's sole interest was in her profits. The excellence of her
house was firmly established. She kept it up, and she kept the
modest prices up. Often she had to refuse guests. She naturally
did so with a certain distant condescension. Her manner to guests
increased in stiff formality; and she was excessively firm with
undesirables. She grew to be seriously convinced that no pension
as good as hers existed in the world, or ever had existed, or ever
could exist. Hers was the acme of niceness and respectability. Her
preference for the respectable rose to a passion. And there were
no faults in her establishment. Even the once despised showy
furniture of Madame Foucault had mysteriously changed into the
best conceivable furniture; and its cracks were hallowed.
She never heard a word of Gerald nor of her family. In the
thousands of people who stayed under her perfect roof, not one
mentioned Bursley nor disclosed a knowledge of anybody that Sophia
had known. Several men had the wit to propose marriage to her with
more or less skilfulness, but none of them was skilful enough to
perturb her heart. She had forgotten the face of love. She was a
landlady. She was THE landlady: efficient, stylish, diplomatic,
and tremendously experienced. There was no trickery, no baseness
of Parisian life that she was not acquainted with and armed
against. She could not be startled and she could not be swindled.
Years passed, until there was a vista of years behind her.
Sometimes she would think, in an unoccupied moment, "How strange
it is that I should be here, doing what I am doing!" But the
regular ordinariness of her existence would instantly seize her
again. At the end of 1878, the Exhibition Year, her Pension
consisted of two floors instead of one, and she had turned the two
hundred pounds stolen from Gerald into over two thousand. _
Read next: BOOK IV WHAT LIFE IS: CHAPTER I - FRENSHAM'S: PART I
Read previous: BOOK III SOPHIA: CHAPTER VII - SUCCESS: PART II
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