I don't see why I should not, after all, use that expression, for it is the correlative of the term _pension bourgeoise_, employed by Balzac in the _Pere Goriot_.
Do you remember the _pension bourgeoise_ of Madame Vauquer _nee_ de Conflans?
But this establishment is not at all like that: and indeed it is not at all _bourgeois_; there is something distinguished, something aristocratic, about it.

The Pension Vauquer was dark, brown, sordid, _graisseuse_; but this is in quite a different tone, with high, clear, lightly-draped windows, tender, subtle, almost morbid, colours, and furniture in elegant, studied, reed-like lines.

Madame de Maisonrouge reminds me of Madame Hulot--do you remember "la belle Madame Hulot ?"--in _Les Barents Pauvres_.

She has a great charm; a little artificial, a little fatigued, with a little suggestion of hidden things in her life; but I have always been sensitive to the charm of fatigue, of duplicity.
I am rather disappointed, I confess, in the society I find here; it is not so local, so characteristic, as I could have desired.

Indeed, to tell the truth, it is not local at all; but, on the other hand, it is cosmopolitan, and there is a great advantage in that.