loss; and the good-natured fugitive, who arrives like a shot
exclaiming, "Ah! what weather, messieurs, what weather!" and bows to
every one; and, finally, the true _bourgeois_ of Paris, with his
unfailing umbrella, an expert in showers, who foresaw this particular
one, but would come out in spite of his wife; this one takes a seat in
the porter's chair. According to individual character, each member of
this fortuitous society contemplates the skies, and departs, skipping
to avoid the mud,--because he is in a hurry, or because he sees other
citizens walking along in spite of wind and slush, or because, the
archway being damp and mortally catarrhal, the bed's edge, as the
proverb says, is better than the sheets. Each one has his motive. No
one is left but the prudent pedestrian, the man who, before he sets
forth, makes sure of a scrap of blue sky through the rifting clouds.

Monsieur de Maulincour took refuge, as we have said, with a whole
family of fugitives, under the porch of an old house, the court-yard
of which looked like the flue of a chimney. The sides of its
plastered, nitrified, and mouldy walls were so covered with pipes and
conduits from all the many floors of its four elevations, that it
might have been said to resemble at that moment the _cascatelles_ of
Saint-Cloud. Water flowed everywhere; it boiled, it leaped, it
murmured; it was black, white, blue, and green; it shrieked, it
bubbled under the broom of the portress, a toothless old woman used to
storms, who seemed to bless them as she swept into the street a mass
of scraps an intelligent inventory of which would have revealed the
lives and habits of every dweller in the house,--bits of printed
cottons, tea-leaves, artificial flower-petals faded and worthless,
vegetable parings, papers, scraps of metal. At every sweep of her
broom the old woman bared the soul of the gutter, that black fissure
on which a porter's mind is ever bent. The poor lover examined this