At this moment a noise came from the servants’ staircase. It was Adèle coming up to wash her ears, Madame Josserand having furiously forbidden her to proceed with her work until she had cleaned them with soap. Trublot peeped out and recognised her.
“Shut the door quick!” said he very anxiously. “Hush! don’t say a word!”
He pricked up his ear, and listened to Adèle’s heavy footstep along the passage.
“You sleep with her too, then?” asked Octave, surprised at his paleness, and guessing that he dreaded a scene.
But this time Trublot was coward enough to deny.
“Oh! no indeed! not with that slut! Whoever do you take me for, my dear fellow!”
He had seated himself on the edge of the bed, and while waiting to finish dressing, begged Octave not to move; and both remained perfectly still, whilst that filthy Adèle scoured out her ears, which took at least ten good minutes. They heard the tempest in her washhand basin.
“There is, however, a room between this one and hers,” softly explained Trublot, “a room that is let to a workman, a carpenter who stinks the place out with his onion soup. ‘This morning again, it almost made me sick. And you know, in all houses, the partitions of the servants’ rooms are now almost as thin as sheets of paper. I don’t understand the landlords. It is not very decent, one can scarcely turn in one’s bed. I think it very inconvenient.”
When Adèle had gone down again, he resumed his swagger and finished dressing himself, making free use of Julie’s combs and pomatum. Octave having spoken of the loft, he insisted on taking him there, for he knew the most out-of-the-way corner of that floor. And, as he passed the doors, he familiarly mentioned the servants’ names: in this bit of a passage, after Adèle came Lisa, the Campardons’ maid, a wench who took her pleasures outside; then, Victoire, their cook, a stranded whale, seventy years old, the only one he respected; then, Françoise, who had entered Madame Valerie’s service the day before, and whose trunk would perhaps only remain twenty-four hours behind the meagre bed upon whieh such a gallop of maids passed, that it was always necessary to make inquiries before going there and waiting in the warmth of the blanket; then, a quiet couple, in the service of the people on the second floor; then, these people’s coachman, a strapping fellow of whom he spoke with the jealousy of a handsome man, suspecting him of going from door to door and noiselessly doing some very fine work; finally, at the other end of the passage, there were Clémenee, the Duveyriers’ maid, whom her neighbour Hippolyte, the butler, rejoined matrimonially every night, and little Louise, the orphan whom Madame Juzeur had taken on trial, a chit of fifteen, who must hear some very strange things in the small hours, if she were a light sleeper.