elsewhere.

Our young doctor had installed himself in the fifth floor of that historic
street, _La Cloitre-Saint-Mery_,--a quarter of the town, poor,
disinherited, sad as himself. Where else, indeed, could he have carried
his mutilated furniture,--which in other quarters would have only excited
distrust? There was he waiting for fortune--not, be it understood, in his
bed, but following science laboriously, uninterruptedly. His life was so
retired--so modest--so silent, that hardly was he known in the house. On
the day of his arrival, he had said to the porter, or rather porteress,
"Madam, I am a doctor--if any one should want me." This was all the
publicity of the new doctor--his sole announcement, his only
advertisement. As his fellow lodgers could gather nothing of him to
gratify or excite curiosity--as his unfrequented door was always strictly
closed, they soon ceased to concern themselves about him. His name even
was forgotten; they simply called him _the doctor_--and with this title
our readers also must be contented, unless their own ingenuity should
enable them to discover another.

One night our doctor heard unaccustomed noises in the house, doors
slamming, people walking to and fro. Presently some one knocked at his
door--verily at _his_ door. What was it? Was the patient come at
last--that first patient, so anxiously expected? He was dressed in an
instant.

"The Countess is dying!" some one cried through the door. "Come,
directly!"

He was at her bedside in a minute.

The Countess! Such was the title given in derision to precisely the
poorest and most miserable old woman in the house. She had been at one
period of her life in the service of a noble family as _femme-de-chambre_;
and as a woman who had seen something of the great world, she held
unqualified strangers at a certain distance, and, to use a common phrase,
kept herself to herself. This had procured her the ill-will and
ill-opinion of several other old crones inhabiting the same house, who
made her the subject of their perpetual scandal. Without doubt, she had
poisoned her last master, and could not look a Christian in the face; or
at very least she had robbed him. Did you ask for proofs? She had a
treasure stitched into a mattress. But she was nearly dying with hunger?
Yes--the niggard! She starved herself, she could not spend her treasure.

Monstrous inventions! The poverty of the Countess, as they called her in
mockery, was complete. Niggar