installed the chevalier.

This house, which we are about to ask the reader to enter with us, stood
at the corner of the rue de la Tixeranderie and the rue Deux-Portes.
There was nothing in the exterior of it to distinguish it from any other,
unless perhaps two brass plates, one of which bore the words MARIE
LEROUX-CONSTANTIN, WIDOW, CERTIFIED MIDWIFE, and the other CLAUDE
PERREGAUD, SURGEON. These plates were affixed to the blank wall in the
rue de la Tixeranderie, the windows of the rooms on that side looking
into the courtyard. The house door, which opened directly on the first
steps of a narrow winding stair, was on the other side, just beyond the
low arcade under whose vaulted roof access was gained to that end of the
rue des Deux-Portes. This house, though dirty, mean, and out of repair,
received many wealthy visitors, whose brilliant equipages waited for them
in the neighbouring streets. Often in the night great ladies crossed its
threshold under assumed names and remained there for several days, during
which La Constantin and Claude Perregaud, by an infamous use of their
professional knowledge, restored their clients to an outward appearance
of honour, and enabled them to maintain their reputation for virtue. The
first and second floors contained a dozen rooms in which these abominable
mysteries were practised. The large apartment, which served as waiting
and consultation room, was oddly furnished, being crowded with objects of
strange and unfamiliar form. It resembled at once the operating-room of
a surgeon, the laboratory of a chemist and alchemist, and the den of a
sorcerer. There, mixed up together in the greatest confusion, lay
instruments of all sorts, caldrons and retorts, as well as books
containing the most absurd ravings of the human mind. There were the
twenty folio volumes of Albertus Magnus; the works of his disciple,
Thomas de Cantopre, of Alchindus, of Averroes, of Avicenna, of
Alchabitius, of David de Plaine-Campy, called L'Edelphe, surgeon to Louis