, painted a dragon-green, strengthened with long iron
bars held on by nails whose heads looked like mushrooms, and covered
with an iron trellis-work, which swelled out at the bottom after the
fashion of the bakers'-shops in former days; the floor paved with large
white stones, most of them broken, the walls yellow, and as bare as
those of a guard-room. Next to the shop came the back-shop, and two
other rooms lighted from the street, in which Popinot proposed to put
his office, his books, and his own workroom. Above these rooms were
three narrow little chambers pushed up against the party-wall, with an
outlook into the court; here he intended to dwell. The three rooms were
dilapidated, and had no view but that of the court, which was dark,
irregular, and surrounded by high walls, to which perpetual dampness,
even in dry weather, gave the look of being daubed with fresh plaster.
Between the stones of this court was a filthy and stinking black
substance, left by the sugars and the molasses that once occupied it.
Only one of the bedrooms had a chimney, all the walls were without
paper, and the floors were tiled with brick.

Since early morning Gaudissart and Popinot, helped by a journeyman whose
services the commercial traveller had invoked, were busily employed in
stretching a fifteen-sous paper on the walls of these horrible rooms,
the workman pasting the lengths. A collegian's mattress on a bedstead of
red wood, a shabby night-stand, an old-fashioned bureau, one table, two
armchairs, and six common chairs, the gift of Popinot's uncle the judge,
made up the furniture. Gaudissart had decked the chimney-piece with
a frame in which was a mirror much defaced, and bought at a bargain.
Towards eight o'clock in the evening the two friends, seated before the
fireplace where a fagot of wood was blazing, were about to attack the
remains of their breakfast.

"Down with the cold mutton!" cried Gaudissart, suddenly, "it is not
worthy of such a housewarming."

"But," said Popinot, showing his solitary coin of twenty francs, which
he was keeping to pay for the prospectus, "I--"

"I--" cried Gaudissart, sticking a forty-franc piece in his own eye.

A knock resounded throughout the court, naturally empty and echoing of
a Sunday, when the workpeople were away from it and the laboratories
empty.

"Here comes the faithful slave of the Rue de la Poterie!" cried the
illustrious Gaudissart.

Sure enough, a waiter entered, followed by tw