The flooring of red-colored tiles was cold and hard to the feet;
before the chairs there were merely a few threadbare little rugs of
poverty-stricken aspect, and athwart this desert all the winds of heaven
blew through the disjointed doors and windows.
Near the fireplace sat Mme Burle, leaning back in her old yellow velvet
armchair and watching the last vine branch smoke, with that stolid,
blank stare of the aged who live within themselves. She would sit thus
for whole days together, with her tall figure, her long stern face and
her thin lips that never smiled. The widow of a colonel who had died
just as he was on the point of becoming a general, the mother of a
captain whom she had followed even in his campaigns, she had acquired
a military stiffness of bearing and formed for herself a code of honor,
duty and patriotism which kept her rigid, desiccated, as it were, by the
stern application of discipline. She seldom, if ever, complained. When
her son had become a widower after five years of married life she
had undertaken the education of little Charles as a matter of course,
performing her duties with the severity of a sergeant drilling recruits.
She watched over the child, never tolerating the slightest waywardness
or irregularity, but compelling him to sit up till midnight when
his exercises were not finished, and sitting up herself until he
had completed them.
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