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death he would never reproach her.
    This is where things stood three months after Marguerite’s return—which is to say, in November or December of 1842.

CHAPTER III
    On the sixteenth, at one o’clock, I presented myself at the rue d’Antin.
    From the gate you could hear the cries of the auctioneers. The apartment was filled with curious onlookers.
    All the notoriously elegant celebrities were there, being surreptitiously inspected by the fashionable ladies who once again were using the pretext of the sale to indulge their right to get a closer look at women with whom they would never have had occasion to mingle, and whose simple pleasures they perhaps secretly envied.
    Mme la Duchesse de F . . . jostled with Mlle A . . . , one of the saddest specimens among our modern courtesans; Mme la Marquise de T . . . hesitated to buy a piece of furniture that was being bid upon by Mme D . . . , the most elegant and noted adulteress of our time; the Duc d’Y . . . , who leaves Madrid only to ruin himself in Paris, and leaves Paris only to ruin himself in Madrid, and who, with all his excesses, doesn’t even exhaust the principal on his income, chatted with Mme M . . . , one of our wittiest raconteurs, who when she feels like it, writes down what she says and signs her name to it, while exchanging confidential glances with Mme de N . . . , that lovely perambulator of the Champs-Élysées, who is almost always dressed in pink or blue and whose carriage is drawn by two giant black horses, which Tony had sold her for ten thousand francs and which sum she had paid him, in her way; and finally Mlle R . . . , who earned through sheer talent twice what society ladies fetched with their dowries and three times what other women brought in with their arts, had come, despite the cold, to make some purchases, and she was not the one who drew the least attention.
    We could also give the initials of a number of people who were reunited in this living room and were astonished to find themselves thrown together; but we fear we might weary the reader.
    Let us merely say that everyone was suffused with a mad gaiety, and that among those present, many had known the dead woman, and seemed not to remember that fact.
    There was much hearty laughter; the auctioneers shouted at earsplitting volume; the salesmen who had invaded the benches in front of the selling tables tried in vain to quiet things down so they could conduct their business calmly. Never had a reunion been noisier or more varied.
    I was gliding inobtrusively into the middle of this depressing tumult when I recalled that there was an area near the bedroom in which the poor creature had died where her furniture was being sold to pay off her debts. Having come more with the intention of looking than buying, I studied the faces of the auctioneers, whose expressions bloomed radiantly every time an object reached a price they had never dreamed possible.
    Honest people who had speculated on the prostitution of this woman, who had profited a hundred percent from her, who had followed the last moments of her life in gossip circulars, and who had come after her death to gather the fruits of their honorable calculations and at the same time to serve the interests of their shameful credit.
    How right the ancients were who had the same god for merchants and for thieves!
    Dresses, shawls, jewels sold with incredible speed. None of that held any interest for me, so I kept waiting.
    Suddenly I heard the cry:
    â€œOne volume, perfect-bound, gilded on the spine, entitled: ‘Manon Lescaut.’ There’s something written on the first page. Ten francs.”
    â€œTwelve,” said a voice after a rather long silence.
    â€œFifteen,” I said.
    Why? I do not know. No doubt for this “something written.”
    â€œFifteen,” repeated the auctioneer.
    â€œThirty,” said the first