As we went out to dine at the wretched eating-house in the Rue de la Harpe to which we subscribed, we asked the name of Number 37, and then heard the weird name Z. Marcas. Like boys, as we were, we repeated it more than a hundred times with all sorts of comments, absurd or melancholy, and the name lent itself to a jest. Juste would fire off the Z like a rocket rising, z-z-z-z-zed; and after pronouncing the first syllable of the name with great importance, depicted a fall by the dull brevity of the second.
“Now, how and where does the man live?”
From this query, to the innocent espionage of curiosity there was no pause but that required for carrying out our plan. Instead of loitering about the streets, we both came in, each armed with a novel. We read with our ears open. And in the perfect silence of our attic rooms, we heard the even, dull sound of a sleeping man breathing.
“He is asleep,” said I to Juste, noticing this fact.
“At seven o’clock!” replied the Doctor.
This was the name by which I called Juste, and he called me the Keeper of the Seals.
“A man must be wretched indeed to sleep as much as our neighbor!” cried I, jumping on to the chest of drawers with a knife in my hand, to which a corkscrew was attached.
I made a round hole at the top of the partition, about as big as a five-sou piece. I had forgotten that there would be no light in the room, and on putting my eye to the hole, I saw only darkness. At about one in the morning, when we had finished our books and were about to undress, we heard a noise in our neighbor’s room. He got up, struck a match, and lighted his dip. I got on to the drawers again, and I then saw Marcas seated at his table and copying law-papers.
His room was about half the size of ours; the bed stood in a recess by the door, for the passage ended there, and its breadth was added to his garret; but the ground on which the house was built was evidently irregular, for the party-wall formed an obtuse angle, and the room was not square. There was no fireplace, only a small earthenware stove, white blotched with green, of which the pipe went up through the roof. The window, in the skew side of the room, had shabby red curtains. The furniture consisted of an armchair, a table, a chair, and a wretched bed-table. A cupboard in the wall held his clothes. The wall-paper was horrible; evidently only a servant had ever been lodged there before Marcas.
“What is to be seen?” asked the Doctor as I got down.