"I, sir! how dare you—"
"Yes, Madame Duflos, you have had lovers; you have really had them. Do you remember a certain night at Versailles?"
At these words, she looked at me attentively for a moment; the colour came to her cheek.
"Eugene!" she cried, and instantly hastened from the room.
Madame Duflos was a milliner whose clerk I had been for some time when, to hide from the search of the police at Arras, I had concealed myself in Paris. She was a droll sort of woman; she had a fine head, bold eye, good eyebrow, majestic forehead; her mouth, elevated at the corners, was large, but adorned with thirty-two teeth of dazzling whiteness; hair of a beautiful black, and aquiline nose, above a tolerably well-furnished moustache, gave to her physiognomy an air which would have been imposing, if her bosom placed between two humps, and her neck plunged into these double shoulders had not suggested the idea of a female Punch.
She was about forty when I first saw her: her appearance was most studiously attended to, and she gave herself the airs of a queen; but from the height of the chair whereon she was perched, so that her knees were elevated above the counter, she seemed less like a Semiramis than the grotesque idol of some Indian pagoda. When I saw her on this species of throne, I had much difficulty to be serious; but I preserved the gravity which circumstances demanded, and had just sufficient command over myself to convert into salutations of the most respectful kind a strong disposition to do entirely otherwise. Madame Duflos took from her bosom a large eye-glass, through which she viewed me, and when she had taken my dimensions from head to foot,
"What is your pleasure, sir?" she said.
I was about to reply, but a clerk who had undertaken to present me, having told her that I was the young man of whom he had spoken, she looked at me again,
