oms.

The windows looked out upon the square yard. The scene was like the
interior of a scavenger's cart. The things, not to speak of the human
beings, which lay rusting, mouldering, and putrefying there, were
indescribable. The fragments seemed to fraternise together. Some fell
from the walls, others from the living tenants of the place. The debris
were sown with their tatters.

Besides the floating population which bivouacked nightly in the square
yard, the Jacressade had three permanent lodgers--a charcoal man, a
rag-picker, and a "gold-maker." The charcoal man and the rag-picker
occupied two of the paillasses of the first story; the "gold-maker," a
chemist, lodged in the loft, which was called, no one knew why, the
garret. Nobody knew where the woman slept. The "gold-maker" was a poet
in a small way. He inhabited a room in the roof, under the tiles--a
chamber with a narrow window, and a large stone fireplace forming a
gulf, in which the wind howled at will. The garret window having no
frame, he had nailed across it a piece of iron sheathing, part of the
wreck of a ship. This sheathing left little room for the entrance of
light and much for the entrance of cold. The charcoal-man paid rent from
time to time in the shape of a sack of charcoal; the rag-picker paid
with a bowl of grain for the fowls every week; the "gold-maker" did not
pay at all. Meanwhile the latter consumed the very house itself for
fuel. He had pulled down the little woodwork which remained; and every
now and then he took from the wall or the roof a lath or some scantling,
to heat his crucible. Upon the partition, above the rag-picker's
mattress, might have been seen two columns of figures, marked in chalk
by the rag-picker himself from week to week--a column of threes, and a
column of fives--according as the bowl of grain had cost him three
liards or five centimes. The gold-pot of the "chemist" was an old
fragment of a bomb-shell, promoted by him to the dignity of a crucible,
in which he mixed his ingredients. The transmutation of metals absorbed
all his thoughts. He was determined before he died to revenge himself by
breaking the windows of orthodox science with the real philosopher's
stone. His furnace consumed a good deal of wood. The hand-rail of the
stairs had disappeared. The house was slowly burning away. The landlady
said to him, "You will leave us nothing but the shell." He mollified her
by addressing her in verses.

Such was the Jacress