he commonest description, another table, worth about forty sous, and
two kitchen chairs with the straw seats almost gone. The extremely
picturesque costume of the centenarian pauper was hanging from a nail,
and below it, on the floor, were the shapeless mat-weed coverings that
served him for shoes, the whole forming, with his amorphous old hat and
knotty stick, a sort of panoply of misery.

As he entered, Cerizet gave a rapid glance at the old man, whose head
lay on a pillow brown with grease and without a pillow-case; his angular
profile, like those which engravers of the last century were fond
of making out of rocks in the landscapes they engraved, was strongly
defined in black against the green serge hangings of the tester.
Toupillier, a man nearly six feet tall, was looking fixedly at some
object at the foot of his bed; he did not move on hearing the groaning
of the heavy door, which, being armed with iron bolts and a strong lock,
closed his domicile securely.

"Is he conscious?" said Cerizet, before whom Madame Cardinal started
back, not having recognized him till he spoke.

"Pretty nearly," she replied.

"Come out on the staircase, so that he doesn't hear us," whispered
Cerizet. "This is how we'll manage it," he continued, in the ear of his
future mother-in-law. "He is weak, but he isn't so very low; we have
fully a week before us. I'll send you a doctor who'll suit us,--you
understand? and later in the evening I'll bring you six poppy-heads.
In the state he's in, you see, a decoction of poppy-heads will send him
into a sound sleep. I'll send you a cot-bed on pretence of your sleeping
in the room with him. We'll move him from one bed to the other, and when
we've found the money there won't be any difficulty in carrying it off.
But we ought to know who the people are who live in this old barrack.
If Perrache suspects, as you think, about the money, he might give an
alarm, and so many tenants, so many spies, you know--"

"Oh! as for that," said Madame Cardinal, "I've found out already that
Monsieur du Portail, the old man who occupies the first floor, has
charge of an insane woman; I heard their Dutch servant-woman, Katte,
calling her Lydie this morning. The only other servant is an old valet
named Bruneau; he does everything, except cook."

"But the binder and the stitcher down below," returned Cerizet, "they
begin work very early in the morning--Well, anyhow, we must study the
matter," he added, in the tone