jail. Above
the arch was a long bas-relief, in hard stone, representing the four
seasons, the faces already crumbling away and blackened. This bas-relief
was surmounted by a projecting plinth, upon which a variety of chance
growths had sprung up,--yellow pellitory, bindweed, convolvuli, nettles,
plantain, and even a little cherry-tree, already grown to some height.

The door of the archway was made of solid oak, brown, shrunken, and
split in many places; though frail in appearance, it was firmly held
in place by a system of iron bolts arranged in symmetrical patterns.
A small square grating, with close bars red with rust, filled up the
middle panel and made, as it were, a motive for the knocker, fastened to
it by a ring, which struck upon the grinning head of a huge nail.
This knocker, of the oblong shape and kind which our ancestors called
_jaquemart_, looked like a huge note of exclamation; an antiquary who
examined it attentively might have found indications of the figure,
essentially burlesque, which it once represented, and which long usage
had now effaced. Through this little grating--intended in olden times
for the recognition of friends in times of civil war--inquisitive
persons could perceive, at the farther end of the dark and slimy vault,
a few broken steps which led to a garden, picturesquely shut in by
walls that were thick and damp, and through which oozed a moisture that
nourished tufts of sickly herbage. These walls were the ruins of the
ramparts, under which ranged the gardens of several neighboring houses.

The most important room on the ground-floor of the house was a large
hall, entered directly from beneath the vault of the porte-cochere.
Few people know the importance of a hall in the little towns of Anjou,
Touraine, and Berry. The hall is at one and the same time antechamber,
salon, office, boudoir, and dining-room; it is the theatre of domestic
life, the common living-room. There the barber of the neighborhood came,
twice a year, to cut Monsieur Grandet's hair; there the farmers, the
cure, the under-prefect, and the miller's boy came on business. This
room, with two windows looking on the street, was entirely of wood. Gray
panels with ancient mouldings covered the walls from top to bottom; the
ceiling showed all its beams, which were likewise painted gray, while
the space between them had been washed over in white, now yellow with
age. An old brass clock, inlaid with arabesques, adorned the mant