The house-painter, simple
fellow, could not think what was the matter with him. He "felt all
anyhow"; so he told his wife when he went home.
The Rue Feydeau, as idlers about town are aware, is a place of
pilgrimage for youths who for lack of a mistress bestow their ardent
affection upon the whole sex. On the first floor of the most rigidly
respectable domicile therein dwelt one of those exquisite creatures
whom it has pleased heaven to endow with the rarest and most
surpassing beauty. As it is impossible that they should all be
duchesses or queens (since there are many more pretty women in the
world than titles and thrones for them to adorn), they are content to
make a stockbroker or a banker happy at a fixed price. To this
good-natured beauty, Euphrasia by name, an unbounded ambition had led
a notary's clerk to aspire. In short, the second clerk in the office
of Maitre Crottat, notary, had fallen in love with her, as youth at
two-and-twenty can fall in love. The scrivener would have murdered the
Pope and run amuck through the whole sacred college to procure the
miserable sum of a hundred louis to pay for a shawl which had turned
Euphrasia's head, at which price her waiting-woman had promised that
Euphrasia should be his.
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