No
one is left but the prudent pedestrian, the man who, before he sets
forth, makes sure of a scrap of blue sky through the rifting clouds.
Monsieur de Maulincour took refuge, as we have said, with a whole
family of fugitives, under the porch of an old house, the court-yard
of which looked like the flue of a chimney. The sides of its
plastered, nitrified, and mouldy walls were so covered with pipes and
conduits from all the many floors of its four elevations, that it
might have been said to resemble at that moment the _cascatelles_ of
Saint-Cloud. Water flowed everywhere; it boiled, it leaped, it
murmured; it was black, white, blue, and green; it shrieked, it
bubbled under the broom of the portress, a toothless old woman used to
storms, who seemed to bless them as she swept into the street a mass
of scraps an intelligent inventory of which would have revealed the
lives and habits of every dweller in the house,--bits of printed
cottons, tea-leaves, artificial flower-petals faded and worthless,
vegetable parings, papers, scraps of metal. At every sweep of her
broom the old woman bared the soul of the gutter, that black fissure
on which a porter's mind is ever bent. The poor lover examined this
scene, like a thousand others which our heaving Paris presents daily;
but he examined it mechanically, as a man absorbed in thought, when,
happening to look up, he found himself all but nose to nose with a man
who had just entered the gateway.
In appearance this man was a beggar, but not the Parisian beggar,
--that creation without a name in human language; no, this man formed
another type, while presenting on the outside all the ideas suggested
by the word "beggar.
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