examined it attentively might have found indications of the figure,
essentially burlesque, which it once represented, and which long usage
had now effaced. Through this little grating--intended in olden times
for the recognition of friends in times of civil war--inquisitive
persons could perceive, at the farther end of the dark and slimy
vault, a few broken steps which led to a garden, picturesquely shut in
by walls that were thick and damp, and through which oozed a moisture
that nourished tufts of sickly herbage. These walls were the ruins of
the ramparts, under which ranged the gardens of several neighboring
houses.

The most important room on the ground-floor of the house was a large
hall, entered directly from beneath the vault of the porte-cochere.
Few people know the importance of a hall in the little towns of Anjou,
Touraine, and Berry. The hall is at one and the same time antechamber,
salon, office, boudoir, and dining-room; it is the theatre of domestic
life, the common living-room. There the barber of the neighborhood
came, twice a year, to cut Monsieur Grandet's hair; there the farmers,
the cure, the under-prefect, and the miller's boy came on business.
This room, with two windows looking on the street, was entirely of
wood. Gray panels with ancient mouldings covered the walls from top to
bottom; the ceiling showed all its beams, which were likewise painted
gray, while the space between them had been washed over in white, now
yellow with age. An old brass clock, inlaid with arabesques, adorned
the mantel of the ill-cut white stone chimney-piece, above which was a
greenish mirror, whose edges, bevelled to show the thickness of the
glass, reflected a thread of light the whole length of a gothic frame
in damascened steel-work. The two copper-gilt candelabra which
decorated the corners of the chimney-piece served a double purpose: by
taking off the side-branches, each of which held a socket, the main