On entering it you shiver. A greenish humidity leaks at
the foot of the wall. This building of yesterday is already
a ruin; it is more than a ruin, it is a disaster; one feels
that the proprietor is bankrupt and that the contractor has
fled.

In rear of the house, a wall white and new like the rest,
encloses a space in which a drum major could not lie at
full length. This is called the garden. Issuing shiveringly
from the earth is a little tree, long, spare and sickly,
which seems always to be in winter, for it has not a single
leaf. This broom is called a poplar. The remainder of the
garden is strewn with old potsherds and bottoms of bottles.
Among them one notices two or three list slippers. In a
corner on top of a heap of oyster shells is an old tin
watering can, painted green, dented, rusty and cracked,
inhabited by slugs which silver it with their trails of slime.

Let us enter the hovel. In the other you will find perhaps
a ladder "rickety," as Regnier says, "from the top
to the bottom." Here you will find a staircase.

This staircase, "ornamented" with brass-knobbed banisters,
has fifteen or twenty wooden steps, high, narrow,
with sharp angles, which rise perpendicularly to
the first floor and turn upon themselves in a spiral of about
eighteen inches in diameter. Would you not be inclined
to ask for a ladder?

At the top of these stairs, if you get there, is the room.