Project Gutenberg's At the Sign of the Cat and Racket, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: At the Sign of the Cat and Racket

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Clara Bell

Release Date: March, 1998 [Etext #1680]
Posting Date: February 28, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AT THE SIGN OF THE CAT AND RACKET ***

Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny

AT THE SIGN OF THE CAT AND RACKET

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by Clara Bell

DEDICATION

To Mademoiselle Marie de Montheau

AT THE SIGN OF THE CAT AND RACKET

Half-way down the Rue Saint-Denis, almost at the corner of the Rue du
Petit-Lion, there stood formerly one of those delightful houses which
enable historians to reconstruct old Paris by analogy. The threatening
walls of this tumbledown abode seemed to have been decorated with
hieroglyphics. For what other name could the passer-by give to the Xs
and Vs which the horizontal or diagonal timbers traced on the front,
outlined by little parallel cracks in the plaster? It was evident that
every beam quivered in its mortices at the passing of the lightest
vehicle. This venerable structure was crowned by a triangular roof of
which no example will, ere long, be seen in Paris. This covering, warped
by the extremes of the Paris climate, projected three feet over the
roadway, as much to protect the threshold from the rainfall as to
shelter the wall of a loft and its sill-less dormer-window. This upper
story was built of planks, overlapping each other like slates, in order,
no doubt, not to overweight the frail house.

One rainy morning in the month of March, a young man, carefully wrapped
in his cloak, stood under the awning of a shop opposite this old house,
which he was studying with the enthusiasm of an antiquary. In point of
fact, this relic of the civic life of the sixteenth century offered
more than one problem to the consideration of an observer. Each story
presented some singularity; on the first floor four tall, narrow
windows, close together, were filled as to the lower panes with boards,
so as to produce the d