a rich owner to sell the front buildings to the city, and to
build a new house upon the courtyard; but the whole of the first floor
was let on an eighteen years' lease to a mysterious personage, about
whom neither the official policing of the concierge nor the curiosity of
the other tenants could find anything to censure.

This tenant, now seventy years of age, had built, in 1829, an outer
stairway, leading from the right wing of the first floor to the garden,
so that he could get there without going through the courtyard. Half the
ground-floor was occupied by a book-stitcher, who for the last ten
years had used the stable and coach-house for workshops. A book-binder
occupied the other half. The binder and the stitcher lived, each of
them, in half the garret rooms over the front building on the street.
The garrets above the rear wings were occupied, the one on the right
by the mysterious tenant, the one on the left by Toupillier, who paid
a hundred francs a year for it, and reached it by a dark staircase,
lighted by small round windows. The porte-cochere was made in the
circular form indispensable in a street so narrow that two carriages
cannot pass in it.

Cerizet laid hold of the rope which served as a baluster, to climb the
species of ladder leading to the room where the so-called beggar was
dying,--a room in which the odious spectacle of pretended pauperism
was being played. In Paris, everything that is done for a purpose
is thoroughly done. Would-be paupers are as clever at mounting their
disguise as shopkeepers in preparing their show-windows, or sham rich
men in obtaining credit.

The floor had never been swept; the bricks had disappeared beneath
layers of dirt, dust, dried mud, and any and every thing thrown down by
Toupillier. A miserable stove of cast-iron, the pipe of which entered
a crumbling chimney, was the most apparent piece of furniture in this
hovel. In an alcove stood a bed, with tester and valence of green serge,
which the moths had transformed into lace. The window, almost useless,
had a heavy coating of grease upon its panes, which dispensed with
the necessity of curtains. The whitewashed walls presented to the eye
fuliginous tones, due to the wood and peat burned by the pauper in his
stove. On the fireplace were a broken water-pitcher, two bottles, and
a cracked plate. A worm-eaten chest of drawers contained his linen and
decent clothes. The rest of the furniture consisted of a night-table of
t