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THE PENSION BEAUREPAS
THE PENSION BEAUREPAS HENRY JAMES CHAPTER I.
I was not rich--on the contrary; and I had been told the Pension
Beaurepas was cheap. I had moreover been told that a boarding-
house is a capital place for the study of human nature. I had a
fancy for a literary career and a friend of mine had said to me "If
you mean to write you ought to go and live in a boarding-house; there
is no other such place to pick up material." I had read something of
this kind in a letter addressed by Stendhal to his sister: "I have a
passionate desire to know human nature and have a great mind to live
in a boarding-house where people cannot conceal their real
characters." I was an admirer of La Chartreuse de Parme and it
appeared to me that one could not do better than follow in the
footsteps of its author. I remembered too the magnificent
boarding-house in Balzac's Pere Goriot--the "pension bourgeoise des
deux sexes et autres" kept by Madame Vauquer nee De Conflans.
Magnificent I mean as a piece of portraiture; the establishment as
an establishment was certainly sordid enough and I hoped for better
things from the Pension Beaurepas. This institution was one of the
most esteemed in Geneva and standing in a little garden of its own
not far from the lake had a very homely comfortable sociable
aspect. The regular entrance was as one might say at the back
which looked upon the street or rather upon a little place adorned
like every place in Geneva great or small with a fountain. This
fact was not prepossessing for on crossing the threshold you found
yourself more or less in the kitchen encompassed with culinary
odours. This however was no great matter for at the Pension
Beaurepas there was no attempt at gentility or at concealment of the
domestic machinery. The latter was of a very simple sort. Madame
Beaurepas was an excellent little old woman--she was very far
advanced in life and had been keeping a pension for forty years--
whose only faults were that she was slightly deaf that she was fond
of a surreptitious pinch of snuff and that at the age of seventy-
three she wore flowers in her cap. There was a tradition in the
house that she was not so deaf as she pretended; that she feigned
this infirmity in order to possess herself of the secrets of her
lodgers. But I never subscribed to this theory; I am convinced that
Madame Beaurepas had outlived the period of indiscreet curiosity.
She was a philosopher on a matter-of-fact basis; she had been having
lodgers for forty years and all that she asked of them was that they
should pay their bills make use of the door-mat and fold their
napkins. She cared very little for their secrets. "J'en ai vus de
toutes les couleurs" she said to me. She had quite ceased to care
for individuals; she cared only for types for categories. Her large
observation had made her acquainted with a great number and her mind
was a complete collection of "heads." She flattered herself that she
knew at a glance where to pigeon-hole a new-comer and if she made
any mistakes her deportment never betrayed them. I think that as
regards individuals she had neither likes nor dislikes; but she was
capable of expressing esteem or contempt for a species. She had her
own ways I suppose of manifesting her approval but her manner of
indicating the reverse was simple and unvarying. "Je trouve que
c'est deplace"--this exhausted her view of the matter. If one of her
inmates had put arsenic into the pot-au-feu I believe Madame
Beaurepas would have contented herself with remarking that the
proceeding was out of place. The line of misconduct to which she
most objected was an undue assumption of gentility; she had no
patience with boarders who gave themselves airs. "When people come
chez moi it is not to cut a figure in the world; I have never had
that illusion" I remember hearing her say; "and when you pay seven
francs a day tout compris it comprises everything but the right to
look down upon the others. But there are people who the less they
pay the more they take themselves au serieux. My most difficult
boarders have always been those who have had the little rooms."
Madame Beaurepas had a niece a young woman of some forty odd years;
and the two ladies with the assistance of a couple of thick-waisted
red-armed peasant women kept the house going. If on your exits and
entrances you peeped into the kitchen it made very little
difference; for Celestine the cook had no pretension to be an
invisible functionary or to deal in occult methods. She was always
at your service with a grateful grin she blacked your boots; she
trudged off to fetch a cab; she would have carried your baggage if
you had allowed her on her broad little back. She was always
tramping in and out between her kitchen and the fountain in the
place where it often seemed to me that a large part of the
preparation for our dinner went forward--the wringing out of towels
and table-cloths the washing of potatoes and cabbages the scouring
of saucepans and cleansing of water--bottles. You enjoyed from the
doorstep a perpetual back-view of Celestine and of her large loose
woollen ankles as she craned from the waist over into the fountain
and dabbled in her various utensils. This sounds as if life went on
in a very make-shift fashion at the Pension Beaurepas--as if the tone
of the establishment were sordid. But such was not at all the case.
We were simply very bourgeois; we practised the good old Genevese
principle of not sacrificing to appearances. This is an excellent
principle--when you have the reality. We had the reality at the
Pension Beaurepas: we had it in the shape of soft short beds
equipped with fluffy duvets; of admirable coffee served to us in the
morning by Celestine in person as we lay recumbent on these downy
couches; of copious wholesome succulent dinners conformable to the
best provincial traditions. For myself I thought the Pension
Beaurepas picturesque and this with me at that time was a great
word. I was young and ingenuous: I had just come from America. I
wished to perfect myself in the French tongue and I innocently
believed that it flourished by Lake Leman. I used to go to lectures
at the Academy and come home with a violent appetite. I always
enjoyed my morning walk across the long bridge (there was only one
just there in those days) which spans the deep blue out-gush of the
lake and up the dark steep streets of the old Calvinistic city. The
garden faced this way toward the lake and the old town; and this was
the pleasantest approach to the house. There was a high wall with a
double gate in the middle flanked by a couple of ancient massive
posts; the big rusty grille contained some old-fashioned iron-work.
The garden was rather mouldy and weedy tangled and untended; but it
contained a little thin--flowing fountain several green benches a
rickety little table of the same complexion and three orange-trees
in tubs which were deposited as effectively as possible in front of
the windows of the salon.
CHAPTER II.
As commonly happens in boarding-houses the rustle of petticoats was
at the Pension Beaurepas the most familiar form of the human tread.
There was the usual allotment of economical widows and old maids and
to maintain the balance of the sexes there were only an old Frenchman
and a young American. It hardly made the matter easier that the old
Frenchman came from Lausanne. He was a native of that estimable
town but he had once spent six months in Paris he had tasted of the
tree of knowledge; he had got beyond Lausanne whose resources he
pronounced inadequate. Lausanne as he said "manquait d'agrements."
When obliged for reasons which he never specified to bring his
residence in Paris to a close he had fallen back on Geneva; he had
broken his fall at the Pension Beaurepas. Geneva was after all
more like Paris and at a Genevese boarding-house there was sure to
be plenty of Americans with whom one could talk about the French
metropolis. M. Pigeonneau was a little lean man with a large narrow
nose who sat a great deal in the garden reading with the aid of a
large magnifying glass a volume from the cabinet de lecture.
One day a fortnight after my arrival at the Pension Beaurepas I
came back rather earlier than usual from my academic session; it
wanted half an hour of the midday breakfast. I went into the salon
with the design of possessing myself of the day's Galignani before
one of the little English old maids should have removed it to her
virginal bower--a privilege to which Madame Beaurepas frequently
alluded as one of the attractions of the establishment. In the salon
I found a new-comer a tall gentleman in a high black hat whom I
immediately recognised as a compatriot. I had often seen him or his
equivalent in the hotel parlours of my native land. He apparently
supposed himself to be at the present moment in a hotel parlour; his
hat was on his head or rather half off it--pushed back from his
forehead and rather suspended than poised. He stood before a table
on which old newspapers were scattered one of which he had taken up
and with his eye-glass on his nose was holding out at arm's-length.
It was that honourable but extremely diminutive sheet the Journal de
Geneve a newspaper of about the size of a pocket-handkerchief. As I
drew near looking for my Galignani the tall gentleman gave me over
the top of his eye-glass a somewhat solemn stare. Presently
however before I had time to lay my hand on the object of my search
he silently offered me the Journal de Geneve.
"It appears" he said "to be the paper of the country."
"Yes" I answered "I believe it's the best."
He gazed at it again still holding it at arm's-length as if it had
been a looking-glass. "Well" he said "I suppose it's natural a
small country should have small papers. You could wrap it up
mountains and all in one of our dailies!"
I found my Galignani and went off with it into the garden where I
seated myself on a bench in the shade. Presently I saw the tall
gentleman in the hat appear in one of the open windows of the salon
and stand there with his hands in his pockets and his legs a little
apart. He looked very much bored and--I don't know why--I
immediately began to feel sorry for him. He was not at all a
picturesque personage; he looked like a jaded faded man of business.
But after a little he came into the garden and began to stroll about;
and then his restless unoccupied carriage and the vague
unacquainted manner in which his eyes wandered over the place seemed
to make it proper that as an older resident I should exercise a
certain hospitality. I said something to him and he came and sat
down beside me on my bench clasping one of his long knees in his
hands.
"When is it this big breakfast of theirs comes off?" he inquired.
"That's what I call it--the little breakfast and the big breakfast.
I never thought I should live to see the time when I should care to
eat two breakfasts. But a man's glad to do anything over here."
"For myself" I observed "I find plenty to do."
He turned his head and glanced at me with a dry deliberate kind-
looking eye. "You're getting used to the life are you?"
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