He Hoped the Bills Would Not Be Paid
Hareng inventories like a post-mortem. Allow me, madame. He will not take the phrenological head, an instrument of the profession, but he counts plates and shakes letters in the attic with fingers like slugs. A man in possession hides under the roof. Charles hears a rattling window. Yellow posters go up. Guillaumin's dining room gleams with Esmeralda and Potiphar; Emma thinks this is the dining-room she ought to have had, then finds the loan is a knee against her boot. She is to be pitied, she says, not sold. Consumption promised the room. Inventory is the room, opened.
Key Insight
The climax of debt is not the unpaid total. It is other people handling the objects you used to prove you were living. Taste becomes evidence. Evidence becomes a crowd around a bill on a post.
“Her whole existence to its most intimate details, was, like a corpse on whom a post-mortem is made, outspread before the eyes of these three men.”Full analysis
