Madame Nanteuil lived with her daughter in a little flat on the fifth story of a house in the Boulevard Saint-Michel, whose windows opened upon the garden of the Luxembourg.

She gave Chevalier a friendly welcome, for she thought kindly of him because he loved Felicie, and because the latter did not love him in return, and ignored on principle the fact that he had been her daughter's lover.
She made him sit beside her in the dining-room, where a coke fire was burning in the stove.

In the lamplight army revolvers and sabres with golden tassels on the sword-knots gleamed upon the wall.

They were hung about a woman's cuirass, which was provided with round breast-shields of tin-plate; a piece of armour which Felicie had worn last winter, while still a pupil at the Conservatoire, when taking the part of Joan of Arc at the house of a spiritualistic duchess.

An officer's widow and the mother of an actress, Madame Nanteuil, whose real name was Nantean, treasured these trophies.
"Felicie is not back yet, Monsieur Chevalier.