Andras could not meet Jacquemin that day, unless he waited for him at the
office of 'L'Actualite' until the races were over, and he therefore
postponed his intended interview until the next day.

About eleven o'clock in the morning, after a sleepless night, he sought-
the Rue Rochechouart, and the house Fremin had described to him. It was
there: an old weather-beaten house, with a narrow entrance and a
corridor, in the middle of which flowed a dirty, foul-smelling stream of
water; the room of the concierge looked like a black hole at the foot of
the staircase, the balusters and walls of which were wet with moisture
and streaked with dirt; a house of poor working-people, many stories
high, and built in the time when this quarter of Paris was almost a
suburb.

Andras hesitated at first to enter, thinking that he must be mistaken.
He thought of little Jacquemin, dainty and neat as if he had just stepped
out of a bandbox, and his disdainful remarks upon the races of Enghien,
where the swells no longer went. It was not possible that he lived here
in this wretched, shabby place.

The concierge replied to the Prince, however, when he asked for
Jacquemin: "Yes, Monsieur, on the fifth floor, the door to the right;"
and Zilah mounted the dark stairs.

When he reached the fifth floor, he did not yet believe it possible that
the Jacquemin who lived there was the one he had seen the day before, the
one whom Baroness Dinati petted, "our witty colleague Jacquemin."

He knocked, however, at the door on the right, as he had been directed.
No one came to open it; but he could hear within footsteps and indistinct