Regency, covered now with dust and oblivion, and fantastically placed
across the street. Here and there green branches lent gayety to that
city corner. Therese, while ringing at the door, saw in the limited
perspective of the houses a pulley at a window and a gilt key, the sign
of a locksmith. Her eyes were full of this picture, which was new to
her. Pigeons flew above her head; she heard chickens cackle. A servant
with a military look opened the door. She found herself in a yard
covered with sand, shaded by a tree, where, at the left, was the
janitor's box with bird-cages at the windows. On that side rose, under a
green trellis, the mansard of the neighboring house. A sculptor's studio
backed on it its glass-covered roof, which showed plaster figures asleep
in the dust. At the right, the wall that closed the yard bore debris of
monuments, broken bases of columnettes. In the rear, the house, not very
large, showed the six windows of its facade, half hidden by vines and
rosebushes.

Philippe Dechartre, infatuated with the architecture of the fifteenth
century in France, had reproduced there very cleverly the characteristics
of a private house of the time of Louis XII. That house, begun in the
middle of the Second Empire, had not been finished. The builder of so
many castles died without being able to finish his own house. It was
better thus. Conceived in a manner which had then its distinction and
its value, but which seems to-day banal and outlandish, having lost
little by little its large frame of gardens, cramped now between the
walls of the tall buildings, Philippe Dechartre's little house, by the
roughness of its stones, by the naive heaviness of its windows, by the
simplicity of the roof, which the architect's widow had caused to be
covered with little expense, by all the lucky accidents of the unfinished
and unpremeditated, corrected the lack of grace of its new and affected
antiquity and archeologic romanticism, and harmonized with the humbleness