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solemn about it, as befits a caprice of love and magistracy.
This house and corridor, which have now disappeared,
were in existence fifteen years ago. In ‘93 a coppersmith had
purchased the house with the idea of demolishing it, but
had not been able to pay the price; the nation made him
bankrupt. So that it was the house which demolished the
coppersmith. After that, the house remained uninhabited,
and fell slowly to ruin, as does every dwelling to which the
presence of man does not communicate life. It had remained
fitted with its old furniture, was always for sale or to let, and
the ten or a dozen people who passed through the Rue Plu-
met were warned of the fact by a yellow and illegible bit of
writing which had hung on the garden wall since 1819.
Towards the end of the Restoration, these same passers-
by might have noticed that the bill had disappeared, and
even that the shutters on the first floor were open. The house
was occupied, in fact. The windows had short curtains, a
sign that there was a woman about.
In the month of October, 1829, a man of a certain age had
presented himself and had hired the house just as it stood,
including, of course, the back building and the lane which
ended in the Rue de Babylone. He had had the secret open-
ings of the two doors to this passage repaired. The house, as
we have just mentioned, was still very nearly furnished with
the justice’s old fitting; the new tenant had ordered some
repairs, had added what was lacking here and there, had re-
placed the paving-stones in the yard, bricks in the floors,
steps in the stairs, missing bits in the inlaid floors and the
glass in the lattice windows, and had finally installed him-