"The Ambassador," my mother told her, "assured me that he knows no place where he can get cold beef and soufflés as good as yours." Françoise, with an air of modesty and of paying just homage to the truth, agreed, but seemed not at all impressed by the title "Ambassador"; she said of M. de Norpois, with the friendliness due to a man who had taken her for a chef: "He's a good old soul, like me." She had indeed hoped to catch sight of him as he arrived, but knowing that Mamma hated their standing about behind doors and in windows, and thinking that Mamma would get to know from the other servants or from the porter that she had been keeping watch (for Françoise saw everywhere nothing but "jealousies" and "tale-bearings", which played the same grim and unending part in her imagination as do for others of us the intrigues of the Jesuits or the Jews), she had contented herself with a peep from the kitchen window, "so as not to have words with Madame," and beneath the momentary aspect of M. de Norpois had "thought it was Monsieur Legrand," because of what she called his "agelity" and in spite of their having not a single point in common.