They went there every evening about eleven o'clock, just as they would go to the club.
Six or eight of them; always the same set, not fast men, but respectable tradesmen, and
young men in government or some other employ, and they would drink their Chartreuse,
and laugh with the girls, or else talk seriously with Madame Tellier, whom everybody
respected, and then they would go home at twelve o'clock! The younger men would
sometimes stay later.
It was a small, comfortable house painted yellow, at the corner of a street behind Saint
Etienne's Church, and from the windows one could see the docks full of ships being
unloaded, the big salt marsh, and, rising beyond it, the Virgin's Hill with its old gray
chapel.
Madame Tellier, who came of a respectable family of peasant proprietors in the
Department of the Eure, had taken up her profession, just as she would have become a
milliner or dressmaker. The prejudice which is so violent and deeply rooted in large
towns, does not exist in the country places in Normandy. The peasant says:
"It is a paying-business," and he sends his daughter to keep an establishment of this
character just as he would send her to keep a girls' school.
She had inherited the house from an old uncle, to whom it had belonged. Monsieur and
Madame Tellier, who had formerly been innkeepers near Yvetot, had immediately sold
their house, as they thought that the business at Fecamp was more profitable, and they
arrived one fine morning to assume the direction of the enterprise, which was declining
on account of the absence of the proprietors. They were good people enough in their way,
and soon made themselves liked by their staff and their neighbors.
Monsieur died of apoplexy two years later, for as the new place kept him in idleness and
without any exercise, he had grown excessively stout, and his health had suffered. Since
she had been a widow, all the frequenters of the establishment made much of her; but
people said that, personally, she was quite virtuous, and even the girls in the house could
not discover anything against her. She was tall, stout and affable, and her complexion,
which had become pale in the dimness of her house, the shutters of which were scarcely
ever opened, shone as if it had been varnished. She had a fringe of curly false hair, which
gave her a juvenile look, that contrasted strongly with the ripeness of her figure. She was
always smiling and cheerful, and was fond of a joke, but there was a shade of reserve
about her, which her occupation had not quite made her lose. Coarse words always
shocked her, and when any young fellow who had been badly brought up called her
establishment a hard name, she was angry and disgusted.
In a word, she had a refined mind, and although she treated her women as friends, yet she
very frequently used to say that "she and they were not made of the same stuff."
