"Vigging?"
"That is one way of saying that he combed my hair for me."
"Combed your hair?"
"He gave me a scolding for meddling in your affairs. . . . So we must be very careful if you come to me. But I doubt whether you will stay when you have seen the place; you do not know how we poor devils live."
"I should rader der boor home of a goot-hearted mann dot haf mourned Bons, dan der Duileries mit men dot haf ein tiger face. . . . I haf chust left tigers in Bons' house; dey vill eat up everydings—"
"Come with me, sir, and you shall see. But—well, anyhow, there is a garret. Let us see what Mme. Topinard says."
Schmucke followed like a sheep, while Topinard led the way into one of the squalid districts which might be called the cancers of Paris—a spot known as the Cite Bordin. It is a slum out of the Rue de Bondy, a double row of houses run up by the speculative builder, under the shadow of the huge mass of the Porte Saint-Martin theatre. The pavement at the higher end lies below the level of the Rue de Bondy; at the lower it falls away towards the Rue des Mathurins du Temple. Follow its course and you find that it terminates in another slum running at right angles to the first—the Cite Bordin is, in fact, a T-shaped blind alley. Its two streets thus arranged contain some thirty houses, six or seven stories high; and every story, and every room in every story, is a workshop and a warehouse for goods of every sort and description, for this wart upon the face of Paris is a miniature Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Cabinet-work and brasswork, theatrical costumes, blown glass, painted porcelain—all the various fancy goods known as l'article Paris are made here. Dirty and productive like commerce, always full of traffic—foot-passengers, vans, and drays—the Cite Bourdin is an unsavory-looking neighborhood, with a seething population in keeping with the squalid surroundings. It is a not unintelligent artisan population, though the whole power of the intellect is absorbed by the day's manual labor. Topinard, like every other inhabitant of the Cite Bourdin, lived in it for the sake of comparatively low rent, the cause of its existence and prosperity. His sixth floor lodging, in the second house to the left, looked out upon the belt of green garden, still in existence, at the back of three or four large mansions in the Rue de Bondy.
Topinard's apartment consisted of a kitchen and two bedrooms. The first was a nursery with two little deal bedsteads and a cradle in it, the second was the bedroom, and the kitchen did duty as a dining-room. Above, reached by a short ladder, known among builders as a "trap-ladder," there was a kind of garret, six feet high, with a sash-window let into the roof. This room, given as a servants' bedroom, raised the Topinards' establishment from mere "rooms" to the dignity of a tenement, and the rent to a corresponding sum of four hundred francs. An arched lobby, lighted from the kitchen by a small round window, did duty as an ante-chamber, and filled the space between the bedroom, the kitchen, and house doors—three doors in all. The rooms were paved with bricks, and hung with a hideous wall-paper at threepence apiece; the chimneypieces that adorned them were of the kind called capucines—a shelf set on a couple of brackets painted to resemble wood. Here in these three rooms dwelt five human beings, three of them children. Any one, therefore, can imagine how the walls were covered with scores and scratches so far as an infant arm can reach.
Rich people can scarcely realize the extreme simplicity of a poor man's kitchen. A Dutch oven, a kettle, a gridiron, a saucepan, two or three dumpy cooking-pots, and a frying-pan—that was all. All the crockery in the place, white and brown earthenware together, was not worth more than twelve francs. Dinner was served on the kitchen table, which, with a couple of chairs and a couple of stools, completed the furniture. The stock of fuel was kept under the stove with a funnel-shaped chimney, and in a corner stood the wash-tub in which the family linen lay, often steeping over-night in soapsuds. The nursery ceiling was covered with clothes-lines, the walls were variegated with theatrical placards and wood-cuts from newspapers or advertisements. Evidently the eldest boy, the owner of the school-books stacked in a corner, was left in charge while his parents were absent at the theatre. In many a French workingman's family, so soon as a child reaches the age of six or seven, it plays the part of mother to younger sisters and brothers.
From this bare outline, it may be imagined that the Topinards, to use the hackneyed formula, were "poor but honest." Topinard himself was verging on forty; Mme. Topinard, once leader of a chorus—mistress, too, it was said, of Gaudissart's predecessor, was certainly thirty years old. Lolotte had been a fine woman in her day; but the misfortunes of the previous management had told upon her to such an extent, that it had seemed to her to be both advisable and necessary to contract a stage-marriage with Topinard. She did not doubt but that, as soon as they could muster the sum of a hundred and fifty francs, her Topinard would perform his vows agreeably to the civil law, were it only to legitimize the three children, whom he worshiped. Meantime, Mme. Topinard sewed for the theatre wardrobe in the morning; and with prodigious effort, the brave couple made nine hundred francs per annum between them.