he
Rue de Fleurus.

If you went there, you would ask yourself, "Who can possibly live
here?"

Who? Wait and see.

II

SILHOUETTE OF THE INHABITANT

One day, about three in the afternoon, that door was opened. Out of it
came a little old man, fat, provided with an abdomen heavy and
projecting which obliges him to make many sacrifices. He has to wear
trousers excessively wide, not to be troubled in walking. He has
renounced, long ago, the use of boots and trouser straps. He wears
shoes. His shoes were hardly polished.

The waistcoat, incessantly impelled to the upper part of the gastric
cavities by that great abdomen, and depressed by the weight of two
thoracic bumps that would make the happiness of a thin woman, offers
to the pleasantries of the passers-by a perfect resemblance to a
napkin rolled on the knees of a guest absorbed in discussion at
dessert.

The legs are thin, the arm is long, one of the hands is gloved only on
most solemn occasions and the other hand ignores absolutely the
advantage of a second skin.

That personage avoids the alms and the pity that his venerable green
frock coat invites, by wearing the red ribbon at his button-hole. This
proves the utility of the Order of the Legion of Honor which has been
contested too much in the past ten years, the new Knights of the Order
say.

The battered hat, in a constant state of horror in the places where a
reddish fuzz endures, would not be picked up by a rag picker, if the
little old man let it fall and left it at a street corner.

Too absent-minded to submit to the bother that the wearing of a wig
entails, that man of science--he is a man of science--shows, when he
makes a bow, a head that, viewed from the top, has the appearance of
the Farnese Hercules's knee.

Above each ear, tufts of twisted white hair shine in the sun like the
angry silken hairs of a boar at bay. The neck is athletic and
recommends itself to the notice of caricaturists by an infinity of
wrinkles, of furrows; by a dewlap faded but armed with darts in the
fashion of thistles.

The constant state of the beard explains at once why the necktie,
always crumpled and rolled by the gestures of a disquiet head, has its
own beard, infinitely softer than that of the good old man, and formed
of threads scratched from its unfortunate tissue.

Now, if you have divined the torso and the powerful back, you will
know the sweet t