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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
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