. This
building of yesterday is already a ruin; it is more than a ruin, it is
a disaster; one feels that the proprietor is bankrupt and that the
contractor has fled.

In rear of the house, a wall white and new like the rest, encloses a
space in which a drum major could not lie at full length. This is called
the garden. Issuing shiveringly from the earth is a little tree, long,
spare and sickly, which seems always to be in winter, for it has not a
single leaf. This broom is called a poplar. The remainder of the garden
is strewn with old potsherds and bottoms of bottles. Among them one
notices two or three list slippers. In a corner on top of a heap of
oyster shells is an old tin watering can, painted green, dented, rusty
and cracked, inhabited by slugs which silver it with their trails of
slime.

Let us enter the hovel. In the other you will find perhaps a ladder
"rickety," as Regnier says, "from the top to the bottom." Here you will
find a staircase.

This staircase, "ornamented" with brass-knobbed banisters, has fifteen
or twenty wooden steps, high, narrow, with sharp angles, which rise
perpendicularly to the first floor and turn upon themselves in a spiral
of about eighteen inches in diameter. Would you not be inclined to ask
for a ladder?

At the top of these stairs, if you get there, is the room.

To give an idea of this room is difficult. It is the "new hovel" in all
its abominable reality. Wretchedness is everywhere; a new wretchedness,
which has no past, no future, and which cannot take root anywhere. One
divines that the lodger moved in yesterday and will move out tomorrow.
That he arrived without saying whence he came, and that he will put the
key under the door when he goes away.

The wall is "ornamented" with dark blue paper with yellow flowers, the
window is "ornamented" with a curtain of red calico in which holes take
the place of flowers. There is in front of the window a rush-bottom
chair with the bottom worn out; near the chair a stove; on the stove a
stewpot; near the stewpot a flowerpot turned upside down with a tallow
candle stuck in the hole; near the flowerpot a basketful of coal which
evokes thoughts of suicide and asphyxiation; above the basket a shelf
encumbered with nameless objects, distinguishable among which are a worn
broom and an old toy representing a green rider on a crimson horse.
The mantelpiece, mean and narrow, is of blackish marble with a thousand
little white blotches. It is