place (made gloomier still by the great walnut-tree
which grew in the yard), but a double flight of steps, with an
elaborately-wrought but rust-eaten handrail, led to the house door.
Inside the house there were two rooms on each floor. The dining-room
occupied that part of the ground floor nearest the street, and the
kitchen lay on the other side of a narrow passage almost wholly taken
up by the wooden staircase. Of the two first-floor rooms, one did duty
as the magistrate's study, the other as a bedroom, while the nursery
and the servants' bedroom stood above in the attics. There were no
ceilings in the house; the cross-beams were simply white-washed and the
spaces plastered over. Both rooms on the first floor and the dining-room
below were wainscoted and adorned with the labyrinthine designs which
taxed the patience of the eighteenth century joiner; but the carving
had been painted a dingy gray most depressing to behold.

The magistrate's study looked as though it belonged to a provincial
lawyer; it contained a big bureau, a mahogany armchair, a law
student's books, and shabby belongings transported from Paris.
Mme. Camusot's room was more of a native product; it boasted a
blue-and-white scheme of decoration, a carpet, and that anomalous kind
of furniture which appears to be in the fashion, while it is simply some
style that has failed in Paris. As to the dining-room, it was nothing
but an ordinary provincial dining-room, bare and chilly, with a damp,
faded paper on the walls.

In this shabby room, with nothing to see but the walnut-tree, the dark
leaves growing against the walls, and the almost deserted road beyond
them, a somewhat lively and frivolous woman, accustomed to the
amusements and stir of Paris, used to sit all day long, day after day,
and for the most part of the time alone, though she received tiresome
and inane visits which led her to think her loneliness preferable to
empty tittle-tattle. If she permitted herself the slightest gleam of
intelligence, it gave rise to interminable comment and embittered her
condition. She occupied herself a great deal with her children, not so
much from taste as for the sake of an interest in her almost solitary
life, and exercised her mind on the only subjects which she could find
--to wit, the intrigues which went on around her, the ways of
provincials, and the ambitions shut in by their narrow horizons. So
she very soon fathomed mysteries of which her husband had no