e is concerned. The personal attendants of kings
prosper at all times; you take an interest in a man, be it only a man in
livery, if you see him every day.

Mme. Camusot, regarding herself as a bird of passage, had taken a little
house in the Rue du Cygne. Furnished lodgings there were none; the town
was not enough of a thoroughfare, and the Camusots could not afford to
live at an inn like M. Michu. So the fair Parisian had no choice for
it but to take such furniture as she could find; and as she paid a
very moderate rent, the house was remarkably ugly, albeit a certain
quaintness of detail was not wanting. It was built against a neighboring
house in such a fashion that the side with only one window in each
story, gave upon the street, and the front looked out upon a yard where
rose-bushes and buckhorn were growing along the wall on either side.
On the farther side, opposite the house, stood a shed, a roof over two
brick arches. A little wicket-gate gave entrance into the gloomy place
(made gloomier still by the great walnut-tree which grew in the yard),
but a double flight of steps, with an elaborately-wrought but rust-eaten
handrail, led to the house door. Inside the house there were two rooms
on each floor. The dining-room occupied that part of the ground floor
nearest the street, and the kitchen lay on the other side of a narrow
passage almost wholly taken up by the wooden staircase. Of the two
first-floor rooms, one did duty as the magistrate's study, the other as
a bedroom, while the nursery and the servants' bedroom stood above in
the attics. There were no ceilings in the house; the cross-beams were
simply white-washed and the spaces plastered over. Both rooms on the
first floor and the dining-room below were wainscoted and adorned with
the labyrinthine designs which taxed the patience of the eighteenth
century joiner; but the carving had been painted a dingy gray most
depressing to behold.

The magistrate's study looked as though it belonged to a provincial
lawyer; it contained a big bureau, a mahogany armchair, a law student's
books, and shabby belongings transported from Paris. Mme. Camusot's
room was more of a native product; it boasted a blue-and-white scheme of
decoration, a carpet, and that anomalous kind of furniture which appears
to be in the fashion, while it is simply some style that has failed in
Paris. As to the dining-room, it was nothing but an ordinary provincial
dining-room, bare and chilly, wit