oulevard
where he might get admittance.

Godefroid followed this advice and saw at the farther end of a little
garden which extended along the boulevard a second door to the house.
The garden, rather ill-kept, sloped downward, for there was enough
difference in level between the boulevard and the rue Notre-Dame des
Champs to make it a sort of ditch. Godefroid therefore walked along one
of the paths, at the end of which he saw an old woman whose dilapidated
garments were in keeping with the house.

"Was it you who rang at the other door?" she asked.

"Yes, madame. Do you show the lodgings?"

On the woman's replying that she did, Godefroid inquired if the other
lodgers were quiet persons; his occupations, he said, were such that he
needed silence and peace; he was a bachelor and would be glad to arrange
with the portress to do his housekeeping.

On this suggestion the portress assumed a gracious manner.

"Monsieur has fallen on his feet in coming here, then," she said;
"except on the Chaumiere days the boulevard is as lonely as the Pontine
marshes."

"Ah! you know the Pontine marshes?" said Godefroid.

"No, monsieur, I don't; but I've got an old gentleman upstairs whose
daughter seems to get her living by being ill, and he says that; I only
repeat it. The poor old man will be glad to know that monsieur likes
quiet, for a noisy neighbor, he thinks, would kill his daughter. On the
second floor we have two writers; they don't come in till midnight, and
are off before eight in the morning. They say they are authors, but I
don't know where or when they write."

While speaking, the portress was showing Godefroid up one of those
horrible stairways of brick and wood so ill put together that it is
hard to tell whether the wood is trying to get rid of the bricks or the
bricks are trying to get away from the wood; the gaps between them
were partly filled up by what was dust in summer and mud in winter.
The walls, of cracked and broken plaster, presented to the eye more
inscriptions than the Academy of Belles-lettres has yet composed. The
portress stopped on the first landing.

"Here, monsieur, are two rooms adjoining each other and every clean,
which open opposite to those of Monsieur Bernard; that's the old
gentleman I told you of,--quite a proper person. He is decorated; but
it seems he has had misfortunes, for he never wears his ribbon. They
formerly had a servant from the provinces, but they sent him away about
thre