ents of their
predecessors, he had drawn up a charter of his own and followed it
religiously. In accordance therewith, the old fellow made no repairs:
no chimney ever smoked, the stairs were clean, the ceilings white, the
cornices irreproachable, the floors firm on their joists, the paint
satisfactory; the locks were never more than three years old, not a pane
of glass was missing, there were no cracks, and he saw no broken tiles
until a tenant vacated the premises. When he met the tenants on their
first arrival he was accompanied by a locksmith and a painter and
glazier,--very convenient folks, as he remarked. The lessee was at
liberty to make improvements; but if the unhappy man did so, little
Molineux thought night and day of how he could dislodge him and relet
the improved appartement on better terms. He watched and waited and spun
the web of his mischievous legal proceedings. He knew all the tricks
of Parisian legislation in the matter of leases. Factious and fond of
scribbling, he wrote polite and specious letters to his tenants; but at
the bottom of all his civil sentences could be seen, as in his faded
and cozening face, the soul of a Shylock. He always demanded six months'
rent in advance, to be deducted from the last quarter of the lease under
an array of prickly conditions which he invented. If new tenants offered
themselves, he got information about them from the police; for he would
not have people of certain callings,--he was afraid, for instance, of
hammers. When the lease was to be signed, he kept the deed and spelled
it over for a week, fearing what he called the _et caetera_ of lawyers.

Outside of his notions as a proprietor, Jean-Baptiste Molineux seemed
good and obliging. He played at boston without complaining of the
players; he laughed at the things which make a bourgeois laugh; talked
of what others of his kind talked about,--the arbitrary powers of
bakers who nefariously sell false weights, of the police, of the heroic
seventeen deputies of the Left. He read the "Good Sense" of the Cure
Meslier, and went to Mass; not that he had any choice between deism and
Christianity, but he took the wafer when offered to him, and argued that
he was therefore safe from the interfering claims of the clergy. The
indefatigable litigant wrote letters on this subject to the newspapers,
which the newspapers did not insert and never answered. He was in other
respects one of those estimable bourgeois who solemnly put