zens walking along in spite of wind and slush, or because, the
archway being damp and mortally catarrhal, the bed's edge, as the
proverb says, is better than the sheets. Each one has his motive. No one
is left but the prudent pedestrian, the man who, before he sets forth,
makes sure of a scrap of blue sky through the rifting clouds.

Monsieur de Maulincour took refuge, as we have said, with a whole family
of fugitives, under the porch of an old house, the court-yard of
which looked like the flue of a chimney. The sides of its plastered,
nitrified, and mouldy walls were so covered with pipes and conduits from
all the many floors of its four elevations, that it might have been
said to resemble at that moment the _cascatelles_ of Saint-Cloud. Water
flowed everywhere; it boiled, it leaped, it murmured; it was black,
white, blue, and green; it shrieked, it bubbled under the broom of the
portress, a toothless old woman used to storms, who seemed to bless them
as she swept into the street a mass of scraps an intelligent inventory
of which would have revealed the lives and habits of every dweller
in the house,--bits of printed cottons, tea-leaves, artificial
flower-petals faded and worthless, vegetable parings, papers, scraps of
metal. At every sweep of her broom the old woman bared the soul of the
gutter, that black fissure on which a porter's mind is ever bent. The
poor lover examined this scene, like a thousand others which our heaving
Paris presents daily; but he examined it mechanically, as a man absorbed
in thought, when, happening to look up, he found himself all but nose to
nose with a man who had just entered the gateway.

In appearance this man was a beggar, but not the Parisian beggar,--that
creation without a name in human language; no, this man formed another
type, while presenting on the outside all the ideas suggested by
the word "beggar." He was not marked by those original Parisian
characteristics which strike us so forcibly in the paupers whom Charlet
was fond of representing, with his rare luck in observation,--coarse
faces reeking of mud, hoarse voices, reddened and bulbous noses, mouths
devoid of teeth but menacing; humble yet terrible beings, in whom a
profound intelligence shining in their eyes seems like a contradiction.
Some of these bold vagabonds have blotched, cracked, veiny skins; their
foreheads are covered with wrinkles, their hair scanty and dirty, like
a wig thrown on a dust-heap. All are gay in