The Loing runs through the town in a waving line, banked by terraced
gardens and neat houses, the aspect of which makes one fancy that
happiness must abide there sooner than elsewhere. When the doctor
turned into the Rue des Bourgeois, Minoret-Levrault pointed out the
property of Levrault-Levrault, a rich iron merchant in Paris who, he
said, had just died.

"The place is for sale, uncle, and a very pretty house it is; there's
a charming garden running down to the river."

"Let us go in," said the doctor, seeing, at the farther end of a small
paved courtyard, a house standing between the walls of the two
neighbouring houses which were masked by clumps of trees and
climbing-plants.

"It is built over a cellar," said the doctor, going up the steps of a
high portico adorned with vases of blue and white pottery in which
geraniums were growing.

Cut in two, like the majority of provincial houses, by a long passage
which led from the courtyard to the garden, the house had only one
room to the right, a salon lighted by four windows, two on the
courtyard and two on the garden; but Levrault-Levrault had used one of
these windows to make an entrance to a long greenhouse built of brick
which extended from the salon towards the river, ending in a horrible
Chinese pagoda.

"Good! by building a roof to that greenhouse and laying a floor," said
old Minoret, "I could put my book there and make a very comfortable
study of that extraordinary bit of architecture at the end."