he legs, it was possible to walk on
both sides of the stream, touching with head or elbows, as you went, the
houses either on the right or the left. These old relics of mediaeval
Normandy have almost a human interest. Tumbledown houses and sorcerers
always go together. Their leaning stories, their overhanging walls,
their bowed penthouses, and their old thick-set irons, seem like lips,
chin, nose, and eyebrows. The garret window is the blind eye. The walls
are the wrinkled and blotchy cheeks. The opposite houses lay their
foreheads together as if they were plotting some malicious deed. All
those words of ancient villany--like cut-throat, "slit-weazand," and the
like--are closely connected with architecture of this kind.

One of these houses in the alley--the largest and the most famous, or
notorious--was known by the name of the Jacressade.

The Jacressade was a lodging-house for people who do not lodge. In all
towns, and particularly in sea-ports, there is always found beneath the
lowest stratum of society a sort of residuum: vagabonds who are more
than a match for justice; rovers after adventures; chemists of the
swindling order, who are always dropping their lives into the
melting-pot; people in rags of every shape, and in every style of
wearing them; withered fruits of roguery; bankrupt existences;
consciences that have filed their schedule; men who have failed in the
house-breaking trade (for the great masters of burglary move in a higher
sphere); workmen and workwomen in the trade of wickedness; oddities,
male and female; men in coats out at elbows; scoundrels reduced to
indigence; rogues who have missed the wages of roguery; men who have
been hit in the social duel; harpies who have no longer any prey; petty
larceners; _queux_ in the double and unhappy meaning of that word. Such
are the constituents of that living mass. Human nature is here reduced
to something bestial. It is the refuse of the social state, heaped up in
an obscure corner, where from time to time descends that dreaded broom
which is known by the name of police. In St. Malo, the Jacressade was
the name of this corner.

It is not in dens of this sort that we find the high-class
criminals--the robbers, forgers, and other great products of ignorance
and poverty. If murder is represented here, it is generally in the
person of some coarse drunkard; in the matter of robbery, the company
rarely rise higher than the mere sharper. The vagrant is there; bu