ot
to put too fine a point upon it, fortune-tellers. Though I had been in
company with clairvoyants in many instances, I had never, before my
return to Paris in the late summer of 1860, entered any one of those
places in which professional fortune-tellers carried on their business.
It was early in September, I think, that at the earnest solicitation of
Von Berg, who had been reading and smoking with me at my lodgings, I
went with him, late in the evening, to a small two-story house in the
Rue La Reynie Ogniard, a little street down the Rue Saint Denis toward
the quays of the Seine, and running from Saint Denis across to the Rue
Saint Martin. The house seemed to me to be one of the oldest in Paris,
although built of wood; and the wrinkled and crazy appearance of the
front was eminently suggestive of the face of an old woman on which time
had long been plowing furrows to plant disease. The interior of the
house, when we entered it by the dingy and narrow hallway, that night,
well corresponded with the exterior. A tallow-candle in a tin sconce was
burning on the wall, half hiding and half revealing the grime on the
plastering, the cobwebs in the corners, and the rickety stairs by which
it might be supposed that the occupants ascended to the second story.

'My companion tinkled a small bell that lay upon a little uncovered
table in the hall, (the outer door having been entirely unfastened, to
all appearance,) and a slattern girl came out from an inner room. On
recognizing my companion, who had visited the house before, she led the
way without a word to the same room she had herself just quitted. There
was nothing remarkable in this. A shabby table, and two or three still
more shabby chairs, occupied the room, and a dark wax-taper stood on the
table, while at the side opposite the single window a curtain of some
dark stuff shut in almost one entire side of the apartment. We took
seats on the rickety chairs, and waited in silence, Adolph informing me
that the etiquette (strange name for such a place) of the house did not
allow of conversation, not with the proprietors, carried on in that
apartment sacred to the divine mysteries.

'Perhaps fifteen minutes had elapsed, and I had grown fearfully tired of
waiting, when the corner of the curtain was suddenly thrown back, and
the figure of a woman stood in the space thus created. Every thing
behind her seemed to be in darkness; but some description of bright
light, which did not s