Godefroid followed this advice and saw at the farther end of a little garden which extended along the boulevard a second door to the house. The garden, rather ill-kept, sloped downward, for there was enough difference in level between the boulevard and the rue Notre-Dame des Champs to make it a sort of ditch. Godefroid therefore walked along one of the paths, at the end of which he saw an old woman whose dilapidated garments were in keeping with the house.
“Was it you who rang at the other door?” she asked.
“Yes, madame. Do you show the lodgings?”
On the woman’s replying that she did, Godefroid inquired if the other lodgers were quiet persons; his occupations, he said, were such that he needed silence and peace; he was a bachelor and would be glad to arrange with the portress to do his housekeeping.
On this suggestion the portress assumed a gracious manner.
“Monsieur has fallen on his feet in coming here, then,” she said; “except on the Chaumiere days the boulevard is as lonely as the Pontine marshes.”
“Ah! you know the Pontine marshes?” said Godefroid.
“No, monsieur, I don’t; but I’ve got an old gentleman upstairs whose daughter seems to get her living by being ill, and he says that; I only repeat it. The poor old man will be glad to know that monsieur likes quiet, for a noisy neighbor, he thinks, would kill his daughter. On the second floor we have two writers; they don’t come in till midnight, and are off before eight in the morning. They say they are authors, but I don’t know where or when they write.”
While speaking, the portress was showing Godefroid up one of those horrible stairways of brick and wood so ill put together that it is hard to tell whether the wood is trying to get rid of the bricks or the bricks are trying to get away from the wood; the gaps between them were partly filled up by what was dust in summer and mud in winter. The walls, of cracked and broken plaster, presented to the eye more inscriptions than the Academy of Belles-lettres has yet composed. The portress stopped on the first landing.
“Here, monsieur, are two rooms adjoining each other and very clean, which open opposite to those of Monsieur Bernard; that’s the old gentleman I told you of,—quite a proper person. He is decorated; but it seems he has had misfortunes, for he never wears his ribbon. They formerly had a servant from the provinces, but they sent him away about three years ago; and now the young son of the lady does everything, housework and all.”