e ground on which the house was built was evidently
irregular, for the party-wall formed an obtuse angle, and the room was
not square. There was no fireplace, only a small earthenware stove,
white blotched with green, of which the pipe went up through the roof.
The window, in the skew side of the room, had shabby red curtains. The
furniture consisted of an armchair, a table, a chair, and a wretched
bed-table. A cupboard in the wall held his clothes. The wall-paper was
horrible; evidently only a servant had ever been lodged there before
Marcas.

"What is to be seen?" asked the Doctor as I got down.

"Look for yourself," said I.

At nine next morning, Marcas was in bed. He had breakfasted off a
saveloy; we saw on a plate, with some crumbs of bread, the remains of
that too familiar delicacy. He was asleep; he did not wake till eleven.
He then set to work again on the copy he had begun the night before,
which was lying on the table.

On going downstairs we asked the price of that room, and were told
fifteen francs a month.

In the course of a few days, we were fully informed as to the mode of
life of Z. Marcas. He did copying, at so much a sheet no doubt, for a
law-writer who lived in the courtyard of the Sainte-Chapelle. He worked
half the night; after sleeping from six till ten, he began again and
wrote till three. Then he went out to take the copy home before dinner,
which he ate at Mizerai's in the Rue Michel-le-Comte, at a cost of nine
sous, and came in to bed at six o'clock. It became known to us that
Marcas did not utter fifteen sentences in a month; he never talked to
anybody, nor said a word to himself in his dreadful garret.

"The Ruins of Palmyra are terribly silent!" said Juste.

This taciturnity in a man whose appearance was so imposing was strangely
significant. Sometimes when we met him, we exchanged glances full of
meaning on both sides, but they never led to any advances. Insensibly
this man became the object of our secret admiration, though we knew no
reason for it. Did it lie in his secretly simple habits, his monastic
regularity, his hermit-like frugality, his idiotically mechanical labor,
allowing his mind to remain neuter or to work on his own lines, seeming
to us to hint at an expectation of some stroke of good luck, or at some
foregone conclusion as to his life?

After wandering for a long time among the Ruins of Palmyra, we forgot
them--we were young! Then came the Carnival, the Paris Carni