whatever language we find it in,
begins scarcely fifty words? Marcas' name was Zephirin; Saint Zephirin
is highly venerated in Brittany, and Marcas was a Breton.

Study the name once more: Z Marcas! The man's whole life lies in this
fantastic juxtaposition of seven letters; seven! the most significant of
all the cabalistic numbers. And he died at five-and-thirty, so his life
extended over seven lustres.

Marcas! Does it not hint of some precious object that is broken with a
fall, with or without a crash?

I had finished studying the law in Paris in 1836. I lived at that time
in the Rue Corneille in a house where none but students came to lodge,
one of those large houses where there is a winding staircase quite at
the back lighted below from the street, higher up by borrowed
lights, and at the top by a skylight. There were forty furnished
rooms--furnished as students' rooms are! What does youth demand more
than was here supplied? A bed, a few chairs, a chest of drawers, a
looking-glass, and a table. As soon as the sky is blue the student opens
his window.

But in this street there are no fair neighbors to flirt with. In front
is the Odeon, long since closed, presenting a wall that is beginning to
go black, its tiny gallery windows and its vast expanse of slate roof.
I was not rich enough to have a good room; I was not even rich enough
to have a room to myself. Juste and I shared a double-bedded room on the
fifth floor.

On our side of the landing there were but two rooms--ours and a smaller
one, occupied by Z. Marcas, our neighbor. For six months Juste and I
remained in perfect ignorance of the fact. The old woman who managed the
house had indeed told us that the room was inhabited, but she had added
that we should not be disturbed, that the occupant was exceedingly
quiet. In fact, for those six months, we never met our fellow-lodger,
and we never heard a sound in his room, in spite of the thinness of the
partition that divided us--one of those walls of lath and plaster which
are common in Paris houses.

Our room, a little over seven feet high, was hung with a vile cheap
paper sprigged with blue. The floor was painted, and knew nothing of
the polish given by the _frotteur's_ brush. By our beds there was only
a scrap of thin carpet. The chimney opened immediately to the roof, and
smoked so abominably that we were obliged to provide a stove at our own
expense. Our beds were mere painted wooden cribs like those i