Esmeralda

“To begin, I am a Frenchman, a teacher of languages, and a poor man,--necessarily a poor man, as the great world would say, or I should not be a teacher of languages, and my wife a copyist of great pictures, selling her copies at small prices. In our own eyes, it is true, we are not so poor--my Clélie and I. Looking back upon our past we congratulate ourselves upon our prosperous condition.

There was a time when we were poorer than we are now, and were not together, and were, moreover, in London instead of in Paris.”