Chapter 4 - Page 2

There is a frightful
bogus sumptuousness about the place that causes a painful
impression--balconies of hollow iron badly fixed to the
wall; trumpery locks, already rotten round the fastenings,
upon which vacillate, on three nails, horrible ornaments
of embossed brass that are becoming covered with
verdigris; shutters painted grey that are getting out of
joint, not because they are worm-eaten, but because they
were made of green wood by a thieving cabinet maker.

A chilly feeling comes over you as you look at the house.
On entering it you shiver. A greenish humidity leaks at
the foot of the wall. This building of yesterday is already
a ruin; it is more than a ruin, it is a disaster; one feels
that the proprietor is bankrupt and that the contractor has
fled.

In rear of the house, a wall white and new like the rest,
encloses a space in which a drum major could not lie at
full length. This is called the garden. Issuing shiveringly
from the earth is a little tree, long, spare and sickly,
which seems always to be in winter, for it has not a single
leaf. This broom is called a poplar. The remainder of the
garden is strewn with old potsherds and bottoms of bottles.
Among them one notices two or three list slippers. In a
corner on top of a heap of oyster shells is an old tin
watering can, painted green, dented, rusty and cracked,
inhabited by slugs which silver it with their trails of slime.

Let us enter the hovel. In the other you will find perhaps
a ladder "rickety," as Regnier says, "from the top
to the bottom." Here you will find a staircase.

This staircase, "ornamented" with brass-knobbed banisters,
has fifteen or twenty wooden steps, high, narrow,
with sharp angles, which rise perpendicularly to
the first floor and turn upon themselves in a spiral of about
eighteen inches in diameter. Would you not be inclined
to ask for a ladder?

At the top of these stairs, if you get there, is the room.

To give an idea of this room is difficult. It is the "new
hovel" in all its abominable reality. Wretchedness is
everywhere; a new wretchedness, which has no past, no
future, and which cannot take root anywhere. One divines
that the lodger moved in yesterday and will move out
tomorrow. That he arrived without saying whence he came,
and that he will put the key under the door when he goes
away.

The wall is "ornamented" with dark blue paper with
yellow flowers, the window is "ornamented" with a curtain
of red calico in which holes take the place of flowers.
There is in front of the window a rush-bottom chair with
the bottom worn out; near the chair a stove; on the stove a
stewpot; near