had not yet reached that impatience which wrings our very entrails and
makes us sweat; he roamed in hope, believing that Madame Jules would
only refrain for a few days from revisiting the place where she knew
she had been detected. He devoted the first days therefore, to a
careful study of the secrets of the street. A novice at such work, he
dared not question either the porter or the shoemaker of the house to
which Madame Jules had gone; but he managed to obtain a post of
observation in a house directly opposite to the mysterious apartment.
He studied the ground, trying to reconcile the conflicting demands of
prudence, impatience, love, and secrecy.

Early in the month of March, while busy with plans by which he
expected to strike a decisive blow, he left his post about four in the
afternoon, after one of those patient watches from which he had
learned nothing. He was on his way to his own house whither a matter
relating to his military service called him, when he was overtaken in
the rue Coquilliere by one of those heavy showers which instantly
flood the gutters, while each drop of rain rings loudly in the puddles
of the roadway. A pedestrian under these circumstances is forced to
stop short and take refuge in a shop or cafe if he is rich enough to
pay for the forced hospitality, or, if in poorer circumstances, under
a _porte-cochere_, that haven of paupers or shabbily dressed persons.
Why have none of our painters ever attempted to reproduce the
physiognomies of a swarm of Parisians, grouped, under stress of
weather, in the damp _porte-cochere_ of a building? First, there's the
musing philosophical pedestrian, who observes with interest all he
sees,--whether it be the stripes made by the rain on the gray
background of the atmosphere (a species of chasing not unlike the
capricious threads of spun glass), or the whirl of white water which
the wind is driving like a luminous dust along the roofs, or the