inte-Genevieve is like a bronze frame for a picture for
which the mind cannot be too well prepared by the contemplation of sad
hues and sober images. Even so, step by step the daylight decreases,
and the cicerone's droning voice grows hollower as the traveler descends
into the Catacombs. The comparison holds good! Who shall say which is
more ghastly, the sight of the bleached skulls or of dried-up human
hearts?

The front of the lodging-house is at right angles to the road, and
looks out upon a little garden, so that you see the side of the house
in section, as it were, from the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve. Beneath the
wall of the house front there lies a channel, a fathom wide, paved with
cobble-stones, and beside it runs a graveled walk bordered by geraniums
and oleanders and pomegranates set in great blue and white glazed
earthenware pots. Access into the graveled walk is afforded by a door,
above which the words MAISON VAUQUER may be read, and beneath, in rather
smaller letters, "_Lodgings for both sexes, etc._"

During the day a glimpse into the garden is easily obtained through a
wicket to which a bell is attached. On the opposite wall, at the further
end of the graveled walk, a green marble arch was painted once upon
a time by a local artist, and in this semblance of a shrine a statue
representing Cupid is installed; a Parisian Cupid, so blistered and
disfigured that he looks like a candidate for one of the adjacent
hospitals, and might suggest an allegory to lovers of symbolism. The
half-obliterated inscription on the pedestal beneath determines the date
of this work of art, for it bears witness to the widespread enthusiasm
felt for Voltaire on his return to Paris in 1777:

"Whoe'er thou art, thy master see;
He is, or was, or ought to be."

At night the wicket gate is replaced by a solid door. The little garden
is no wider than the front of the house; it is shut in between the wall
of the street and the partition wall of the neighboring house. A mantle
of ivy conceals the bricks and attracts the eyes of passers-by to an
effect which is picturesque in Paris, for each of the walls is covered
with trellised vines that yield a scanty dusty crop of fruit, and
furnish besides a subject of conversation for Mme. Vauquer and her
lodgers; every year the widow trembles for her vintage.

A straight path beneath the walls on either side of the garden leads to
a clump of lime-trees at