"Where is it?"
"To the left."
Philippe Goulenoire put the letter into a slit in an iron chest below a loophole window.
"The devil!" thought he. "It is evident that the King comes here, for as many precautions are observed as he takes at Le Plessis."
He waited in the street about a quarter of an hour longer. At the end of that time he heard the old man say to his sister:
"Shut the traps inside the door."
Then a clatter of chains and iron echoed through the porch. Philippe heard bolts drawn and locks creak; finally a small, low door, sheathed with iron, opened so as to afford the smallest chink through which a man might squeeze. At the risk of tearing his clothes, Philippe crept rather than walked into the Malemaison. A toothless old woman with a face like a fiddle, and eyebrows like the handles of a caldron, who could not have put a nut between the tip of her nose and her chin, colorless, sallow, with hollow temples and an appearance of being constructed of nothing but bone and sinew, silently led the stranger into a low sitting-room, while Cornélius prudently kept in the rear.
"Be seated there," said she to Philippe, pointing to a three-legged stool that stood in the corner of a huge chimney-place of carved stone, though there was no fire on the hearth.
On the opposite side of this fireplace was a walnut-wood table with twisted legs, on which there were an egg in a plate and ten or twelve hard strips of dry bread cut with parsimonious exactitude. Two stools, on one of which the old woman seated herself, showed that the good folks were in the act of supping.
Cornélius went to close two iron shutters, protecting the peepholes, no doubt, through which they had so long been gazing into the street; then he came back to his place. Philippe, as he called himself, now saw the brother and sister take it in turns, with perfect gravity, to dip a strip of bread into the egg, with the same precision as soldiers use in dipping their spoon into the tin pot; but they scarcely colored them, in order that the egg might last out the full allowance of strips of bread. This was performed in perfect silence.