d
studied with delight by loungers, in spite of the porter's broom which
pretends to be sweeping out the gateway. Then there's the talkative
refugee, who complains and converses with the porter while he rests on
his broom like a grenadier on his musket; or the pauper wayfarer, curled
against the wall indifferent to the condition of his rags, long used,
alas, to contact with the streets; or the learned pedestrian who
studies, spells, and reads the posters on the walls without finishing
them; or the smiling pedestrian who makes fun of others to whom some
street fatality has happened, who laughs at the muddy women, and makes
grimaces at those of either sex who are looking from the windows; and
the silent being who gazes from floor to floor; and the working-man,
armed with a satchel or a paper bundle, who is estimating the rain as a
profit or loss; and the good-natured fugitive, who arrives like a shot
exclaiming, "Ah! what weather, messieurs, what weather!" and bows
to every one; and, finally, the true _bourgeois_ of Paris, with his
unfailing umbrella, an expert in showers, who foresaw this particular
one, but would come out in spite of his wife; this one takes a seat in
the porter's chair. According to individual character, each member of
this fortuitous society contemplates the skies, and departs, skipping
to avoid the mud,--because he is in a hurry, or because he sees other
citizens walking along in spite of wind and slush, or because, the
archway being damp and mortally catarrhal, the bed's edge, as the
proverb says, is better than the sheets. Each one has his motive. No one
is left but the prudent pedestrian, the man who, before he sets forth,
makes sure of a scrap of blue sky through the rifting clouds.

Monsieur de Maulincour took refuge, as we have said, with a whole family
of fugitives, under the porch of an old house, the court-yard of
which looked like the flue of a chimney. The sides of its plastered,
nitrified, and mouldy walls were so covered with pipes and conduits from
all the many floors of its four elevations, that it might have been
said to resemble at that moment the _cascatelles_ of Saint-Cloud. Water
flowed everywhere; it boiled, it leaped, it murmured; it was black,
white, blue, and green; it shrieked, it bubbled under the broom of the
portress, a toothless old woman used to storms, who seemed to bless them
as she swept into the street a mass of scraps an intelligent inventory
of which would have rev