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So have we arrived at the twilight of the once radiant Savoyarde’s career. She is sixty, and the golden hair has gone grey, and familiarly and affectionately she is known amongst her boarders as “Auntie.” Still, however, does she sew on the missing buttons of the jeunesse of the Latin Quarter, and allow the pension bills to stand over, and overlook the matter of broken washing-basins, and pacify the angry blanchisseuse, and encourage her struggling boarders with the old words of long ago: “Work hard, and make a name for yourself, and come and tell me of your fame....” Years roll on—and “Tante Marie” becomes deaf and frail, and holds a hand to her ear when the pensionnaires of the past return to the Rue des Poitevins—elderly, many of them wealthy and distinguished—and pay her homage, and thank her emotionally for her kindnesses, and leave behind them autographed photographs bearing, amongst many other signatures, the names of Alphonse Daudet, François Coppée, Waldeck-Rousseau (Gambetta’s disciple), Reclus, the great physician, Millerand (ex-Minister of War), Pichon, the actual French Foreign Secretary, and a former President of the Republic, Émile Loubet.... More years roll by and “Tante Marie” becomes bent, shaky and wizened—a nonagenarian. Against her will, she is removed from the sombre, musty old Balzacian pension to a small, modern, electric-lighted apartment—where she dies. Dies, in spite of her beauty, brilliancy, irresistibility, a spinster. Dies with the admission: “It was Gambetta I loved. Impossible, of course. But he called me a Greek Statue!”

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