ourned that autumn to quarters not far off, a wide-faced apartment in
the street then bravely known as the Rue d'Angouleme-St.-Honore and now,
after other mutations, as the Rue La Boetie; which we were again to
exchange a year later for an abode in the Rue Montaigne, this last
after a summer's absence at Boulogne-sur-Mer; the earlier migration
setting up for me the frame of a considerably animated picture. Animated
at best it was with the spirit and the modest facts of our family life,
among which I number the cold finality of M. Lerambert, reflected in
still other testimonies--that is till the date of our definite but
respectful rupture with him, followed as the spring came on by our
ineluctable phase at the Institution Fezandie in the Rue Balzac; of
which latter there will be even more to say than I shall take freedom
for. With the Rue d'Angouleme came extensions--even the mere immediate
view of opposite intimacies and industries, the subdivided aspects and
neat ingenuities of the applied Parisian genius counting as such: our
many-windowed _premier_, above an entresol of no great height, hung over
the narrow and, during the winter months, not a little dusky channel,
with endless movement and interest in the vivid exhibition it supplied.
What faced us was a series of subjects, with the baker, at the corner,
for the first--the impeccable dispenser of the so softly-crusty
crescent-rolls that we woke up each morning to hunger for afresh, with
our weak cafe-au-lait, as for the one form of "European" breakfast-bread
fit to be named even with the feeblest of our American forms. Then came
the small cremerie, white picked out with blue, which, by some secret
of its own keeping, afforded, within the compass of a few feet square,
prolonged savoury meals to working men, white-frocked or blue-frocked,
to uniformed cabmen, stout or spare, but all more or less audibly
_bavards_ and discernibly critical; and next the compact embrasure of
the ecaillere or oyster-lady, she and her paraphernalia fitted into
their interstice much as the mollusc itself into its shell; neighboured
in turn by the marchand-de-bois, peeping from as narrow a cage, his neat
faggots and chopped logs stacked beside him and above him in his
sentry-box quite as the niches of saints, in early Italian pictures, are
framed with tightly-packed fruits and flowers. Space and remembrance
fail me for the rest of the series, the attaching note of which comes
back as the note