CHAPTER IV
“It is to let,” said Mademoiselle Zoe, as they stopped before the gate. “It is to let, but we will not take it. It is too big. Besides——”
“No, we will not take it, but will you look over it? I should be interested to see it again,” said Monsieur Bergeret timidly.
They hesitated a moment. It seemed to them that in entering the deep dark vaulted way they were entering the region of the shades.
Scouring the streets in search of a flat, they had chanced to cross the narrow Rue des Grands-Augustins, which has preserved its old-world aspect, and whose greasy pavements are never dry. They remembered that they had passed six years of their childhood in one of the houses in this street. Their father, a professor at the University, had settled there in 1856, after having led for four years a wandering and precarious existence, ceaselessly hunted from town to town by an inimical Minister of Instruction. And, as witnessed the battered notice-board, the very flat in which Lucien and Zoe had first seen the light of day, and tasted the savour of life, was now to let.
As they passed down the path which led under the massive forefront of the building, they experienced an inexplicable feeling of melancholy and reverence. The damp courtyard was hemmed in by walls which since the minority of Louis XIV had slowly been crumbling in the rains and the fogs rising from the Seine. On the right as they entered was a small building, which served as a porter’s lodge. There, on the window-sill, a magpie hopped about in a cage, and in the lodge, behind a flowering plant, a woman sat sewing.
“Is the second floor on the courtyard to let?”
“Yes, do you wish to see it?”
“Yes, we should like to see it.”