not tell.
It was five o'clock, and, strange to say, he had completely lost his
appetite.

But if the reader is to understand the revolution which Pons' unexpected
return at that hour was to work in the Rue de Normandie, the promised
biography of Mme. Cibot must be given in this place.

Any one passing along the Rue de Normandie might be pardoned for
thinking that he was in some small provincial town. Grass runs to
seed in the street, everybody knows everybody else, and the sight of a
stranger is an event. The houses date back to the reign of Henry IV.,
when there was a scheme afoot for a quarter in which every street was to
be named after a French province, and all should converge in a handsome
square to which La France should stand godmother. The Quartier de
l'Europe was a revival of the same idea; history repeats itself
everywhere in the world, and even in the world of speculation.

The house in which the two musicians used to live is an old mansion with
a courtyard in front and a garden at the back; but the front part of the
house which gives upon the street is comparatively modern, built during
the eighteenth century when the Marais was a fashionable quarter. The
friends lived at the back, on the second floor of the old part of
the house. The whole building belongs to M. Pillerault, an old man of
eighty, who left matters very much in the hands of M. and Mme. Cibot,
his porters for the past twenty-six years.

Now, as a porter cannot live by his lodge alone, the aforesaid Cibot had
other means of gaining a livelihood; and supplemented his five per cent
on the rental and his faggot from every cartload of wood by his own
earnings as a tailor. In time Cibot ceased to work for the master
tailors; he made a connection among the little trades-people of the
quarter, and enjoyed a monopoly of the repairs, renovations, and fine
drawing of all the coats and trousers in three adjacent streets. The
lodge was spacious and wholesome, and boasted a second room; wherefore
the Cibot couple were looked upon as among the luckiest porters in the
arrondissement.

Cibot, small and stunted, with a complexion almost olive-colored by
reason of sitting day in day out in Turk-fashion on a table level with
the barred window, made about twelve or fourteen francs a week. He
worked still, though he was fifty-eight years old, but fifty-eight is
the porter's golden age; he is used to his lodge, he and his room
fit each other like the shell and