'From Ireland.'
The stranger in frieze started, gave an ejaculation of surprise, and, taking out a ten-franc piece, advanced towards the woman, and said he could understand her guessing he was a military man from his tone of voice, and the further fact that he had served in the Legion from his foreign accent; but he demanded in a puzzled tone that she would explain how she had discovered his country before he redeemed his promise.
'We show-folk travel a great deal, sir,' she said in a low voice. 'I have been in Ireland, and I recognised the accent.'
'That explains the mystery. Like Columbus's egg, all things are easy when they're known. Well, madame,' he continued aloud with a chuckle, 'if you've been in Ireland you know us. When we promise France we give the Isle of St. Louis.[6] Here is a ten-sous bit for you.'
Her countenance fell until her delicate fingers conveyed to her senses that it was, indeed, ten francs she possessed. The crowd applauded, said he was as witty as he was generous, and the man in frieze turned on his heel. He looked curiously towards the neat white one-storied structure beside the footpath from the Pont d'Archevêche to the Pont St. Louis, into which a stream of wayfarers was continually flowing, and finally directed his steps thitherward too. It was a cheerful-looking building that, which drew so many visitors, but, nevertheless, it was the Morgue—half-way house between untimely death and the outcast's grave. The stranger entered the wide door—a tall partition divided what was inside from his view; he passed around it and was within the grisly hall. O'Hara mechanically followed; he had no curiosity to scan the lineaments of the naked corpses which awaited recognition within—he was rather blasé of sights of the kind, and regarded a body on a Morgue slab as he would a carcase on a butcher's stall; but he felt a something impelling him towards this stranger who had discovered himself to be a countryman. As he entered, reading, perhaps for the hundredth time, the inscriptions on the wall, which told friends who identified the deceased that they could establish their identity with the greffier free of charge, he caught an exclamation of surprise in English in the brusque voice of the man in frieze.
'Hah! so you've shuffled off this mortal coil, Marguerite.'
O'Hara turned in the direction from which the voice came; he distinguished his compatriot in the middle of an unusually excited mass which pressed against the bars of this loathsome cage of mysterious horrors, a grim smile twisting his features. He could not see any of the twelve sloping tables on which the bodies were laid out in their last toilette—their stiff limbs stretched, hair combed back, hands fixed by their cold sides, and squares of black boarding covering the stomach and thighs—because of the intervening crowd. The clothing of the unclaimed dead, hats, jackets, and blouses, suspended from racks overhead, alone was visible.
'What's the excitement?' he asked of a grizzled soldier, who edged his way back from the bars.
'Oh, it's only a cocotte of the quarter, who's been fool enough to go to the devil before the devil came to her. Sapristi! but she's been a well-favoured wench, and's got a well-turned leg even on her calafaque.'[7]
'Marguerite, Marguerite,' said O'Hara, as if recalling some train of thought.