ne upon soup, a choice of three plates of
meat, about half-a-pint of wine, a dessert and bread at discretion. Our
dinner hour is four o'clock, and we are not likely to eat anything more
before bedtime; although one of us may win a cup of coffee or a dram of
brandy at billiards or dominoes in the evening. Cornichon and Friponnet
dine in the street Chabannais; have soup at a penny a portion, small
plates of meat at twopence each, dessert at a penny, and halfpenny slips
of bread. Each of us when he has dined rolls up a cigarette, and lounges
perhaps round the Palais Royal for half an hour.

As for our lodging the poorest of us live by tens in one room, and sleep
by fours and fives upon one mattress; paying from twopence to tenpence a
night. The ordinary cost of such lodging as the workman in Paris
occupies is, for a whole room for one person, nine or ten shillings a
month; for more than one, six or seven shillings each; and for half a
bed, four shillings. Cornichon lives in room number thirty-six on the
third floor of a furnished lodging house in the street du Petit Lion.
You must ring for the porter if you would go in to Cornichon; and the
porter must, by a jerk at a string, unlatch the street door if Cornichon
wishes to come out to you. In a little court at the back are two flights
of dirty stairs of red tile edged with wood. They lead to distinct
portions of the house. Cornichon's room is paved with red tiles,
polished now and then with beeswax. It is furnished with the bed and a
few inches of bedside carpet, forming a small island on the floor, with
two chairs, a commode with a black marble top, a washing-basin and a
water-bottle. Cornichon has also a cupboard there in which he stores his
wood for winter, paying twenty-pence per hundred pounds for logs; and as
the room contains no grate, he rents a German stove from his landlord,
paying four-and-two-pence for his use of it during the season.

Friponnet rents two unfurnished rooms up four pair of stairs, at the back
of a house in the street d'Argenteuil. He pays ten shillings a month.
They are furnished in mahogany and black marble bought of a broker, and I
think not paid for yet. Fidette visits him there. She is a gold and
silver polisher, his _bonne amie_. She has her own lodging; but she and
Friponnet divide their earnings. They belong to one another: although no
priest has blessed their voluntary contract. It is so, I am pained to
say, with very many