astonished eyes of the scarce inhabitants of that corner of Paris.

A great clamor arose in the newspapers about it. The government corked
up the "Fontis"--such is the name of that territorial bankruptcy--and
the gardens that border the street, destitute of passers-by, were
reassured the more easily because the tax list did not weigh on them.

The arm of the street that extends to the Rue de Fleurus is entirely
occupied, at the left, by a wall on the top of which shine broken
bottles and iron lances fixed in the plaster--a sort of warning to
hands of lovers and of thieves.

In this wall is a door, the famous little garden door, so necessary to
dramas and to novels, which is beginning to disappear from Paris.

This door, painted in dark green, having an invisible lock, and on
which the tax collector had not yet painted a number; this wall, along
which grow thistles and grass with beaded blades; this street, with
furrows made by the wheels of wagons; other walls gray and crowned
with foliage, are in harmony with the silence that reigns in the
Luxembourg, in the convent of the Carmelites, in the gardens of the
Rue de Fleurus.

If you went there, you would ask yourself, "Who can possibly live
here?"

Who? Wait and see.