second house to the left, looked out
upon the belt of green garden, still in existence, at the back of
three or four large mansions in the Rue de Bondy.

Topinard's apartment consisted of a kitchen and two bedrooms. The
first was a nursery with two little deal bedsteads and a cradle in it,
the second was the bedroom, and the kitchen did duty as a dining-room.
Above, reached by a short ladder, known among builders as a
"trap-ladder," there was a kind of garret, six feet high, with a
sash-window let into the roof. This room, given as a servants' bedroom,
raised the Topinards' establishment from mere "rooms" to the dignity of
a tenement, and the rent to a corresponding sum of four hundred francs.
An arched lobby, lighted from the kitchen by a small round window, did
duty as an ante-chamber, and filled the space between the bedroom, the
kitchen, and house doors--three doors in all. The rooms were paved
with bricks, and hung with a hideous wall-paper at threepence apiece;
the chimneypieces that adorned them were of the kind called
_capucines_--a shelf set on a couple of brackets painted to resemble
wood. Here in these three rooms dwelt five human beings, three of them
children. Any one, therefore, can imagine how the walls were covered
with scores and scratches so far as an infant arm can reach.

Rich people can scarcely realize the extreme simplicity of a poor
man's kitchen. A Dutch oven, a kettle, a gridiron, a saucepan, two or
three dumpy cooking-pots, and a frying-pan--that was all. All the
crockery in the place, white and brown earthenware together, was not
worth more than twelve francs. Dinner was served on the kitchen table,
which, with a couple of chairs and a couple of stools, completed the
furniture. The stock of fuel was kept under the stove with a
funnel-shaped chimney, and in a corner stood the wash-tub in which the
family linen lay, often steeping over-night in soapsuds. The nursery
ceiling was covered with clothes-lines, the walls were variegated with
theatrical placards and wood-cuts from newspapers or advertisements.
Evidently the eldest boy, the owner of the school-books stacked in a
corner, was left in charge while his parents were absent at the
theatre. In many a French workingman's family, so soon as a child
reaches the age of six or seven, it plays the part of mother to
younger sisters and brothers.

From this bare outline, it may be imagined that the Topinards, to use
the hackneyed formula, were "po