A Street of Paris and Its Inhabitant | Page 2

top of which shine broken bottles
and iron lances fixed in the plaster--a sort of warning to hands of lovers
and of thieves.
In this wall is a door, the famous little garden door, so necessary to
dramas and to novels, which is beginning to disappear from Paris.
This door, painted in dark green, having an invisible lock, and on
which the tax collector had not yet painted a number; this wall, along
which grow thistles and grass with beaded blades; this street, with
furrows made by the wheels of wagons; other walls gray and crowned
with foliage, are in harmony with the silence that reigns in the
Luxembourg, in the convent of the Carmelites, in the gardens of the
Rue de Fleurus.
If you went there, you would ask yourself, "Who can possibly live
here?"
Who? Wait and see.

II
SILHOUETTE OF THE INHABITANT
One day, about three in the afternoon, that door was opened. Out of it
came a little old man, fat, provided with an abdomen heavy and
projecting which obliges him to make many sacrifices. He has to wear
trousers excessively wide, not to be troubled in walking. He has
renounced, long ago, the use of boots and trouser straps. He wears
shoes. His shoes were hardly polished.
The waistcoat, incessantly impelled to the upper part of the gastric
cavities by that great abdomen, and depressed by the weight of two
thoracic bumps that would make the happiness of a thin woman, offers
to the pleasantries of the passers-by a perfect resemblance to a napkin
rolled on the knees of a guest absorbed in discussion at dessert.

The legs are thin, the arm is long, one of the hands is gloved only on
most solemn occasions and the other hand ignores absolutely the
advantage of a second skin.
That personage avoids the alms and the pity that his venerable green
frock coat invites, by wearing the red ribbon at his button-hole. This
proves the utility of the Order of the Legion of Honor which has been
contested too much in the past ten years, the new Knights of the Order
say.
The battered hat, in a constant state of horror in the places where a
reddish fuzz endures, would not be picked up by a rag picker, if the
little old man let it fall and left it at a street corner.
Too absent-minded to submit to the bother that the wearing of a wig
entails, that man of science--he is a man of science--shows, when he
makes a bow, a head that, viewed from the top, has the appearance of
the Farnese Hercules's knee.
Above each ear, tufts of twisted white hair shine in the sun like the
angry silken hairs of a boar at bay. The neck is athletic and
recommends itself to the notice of caricaturists by an infinity of
wrinkles, of furrows; by a dewlap faded but armed with darts in the
fashion of thistles.
The constant state of the beard explains at once why the necktie, always
crumpled and rolled by the gestures of a disquiet head, has its own
beard, infinitely softer than that of the good old man, and formed of
threads scratched from its unfortunate tissue.
Now, if you have divined the torso and the powerful back, you will
know the sweet tempered face, somewhat pale, the blue ecstatic eyes
and the inquisitive nose of that good old man, when you learn that, in
the morning, wearing a silk head kerchief and tightened in a dressing-
gown, the illustrious professor--he is a professor--resembled an old
woman so much that a young man who came from the depths of
Saxony, of Weimar, or of Prussia, expressly to see him, said to him,
"Forgive me, Madame!" and withdrew.
This silhouette of one of the most learned and most venerated members
of the Institute betrays so well enthusiasm for study and absent-
mindedness caused by application to the quest of truth, that you must
recognize in it the celebrated Professor Jean Nepomucene Apollodore
Marmus de Saint-Leu, one of the most admirable men of genius of our

time.

III
MADAME ADOLPHE
When the old man--the professor counted then sixty-two summers--had
walked three steps, he turned his head at this question, hurled in an
acute tone by a voice that he recognized:
"Have you a handkerchief?"
A woman stood on the step of the garden door and was watching her
master with solicitude.
She seemed to be fifty years of age, and her dress indicated that she
was one of those servants who are invested with full authority in
household affairs.
She was darning stockings.
The man of science came back and said naively:
"Yes, Madame Adolphe, I have my handkerchief."
"Have you your spectacles?" she asked.
The man of science felt the