ndow web,
a thousand amusing things that break its evenness. The window is only a
dormer, but from it protrude long poles on which all sorts of clothing,
of all sorts of colours, hang and dry in the wind-white tatters, red
rags, flags of poverty that give to the hut an air of gaiety and are
resplendent in the sunshine. The door is cracked and black, but approach
and examine it; you will without doubt find upon it a bit of antique
ironwork of the time of Louis XIII., cut out like a piece of guipure.
The roof is full of crevices, but in each crevice there is a convolvulus
that will blossom in the spring, or a daisy that will bloom in the
autumn. The tiles are patched with thatch. Of course they are, I should
say so! It affords the occasion to have on one's roof a colony of pink
dragon flowers and wild marsh-mallow. A fine green grass carpets the
foot of this decrepit wall, the ivy climbs joyously up it and cloaks
its bareness--its wounds and its leprosy mayhap; moss covers with green
velvet the stone seat at the door. All nature takes pity upon this
degraded and charming thing that you call a hovel, and welcomes it.
0 hovel! honest and peaceful old dwelling, sweet and good to see!
rejuvenated every year by April and May! perfumed by the wallflower and
inhabited by the swallow!

No, it is not of this that I write, it is not, I repeat, of an old
house, it is of a new house,--of a new hovel, if you will.

This thing has not been built longer than two years. The wall has that
hideous and glacial whiteness of fresh plaster. The whole is wretched,
mean, high, triangular, and has the shape of a piece of Gruyere
cheese cut for a miser a dessert. There are new doors that do not shut
properly, window frames with white panes that are already spangled here
and there with paper stars. These stars are cut coquettishly and pasted
on with care. There is a frightful bogus sumptuousness about the place
that causes a painful impression--balconies of hollow iron badly fixed
to the wall; trumpery locks, already rotten round the fastenings, upon
which vacillate, on three nails, horrible ornaments of embossed brass
that are becoming covered with verdigris; shutters painted grey that are
getting out of joint, not because they are worm-eaten, but because they
were made of green wood by a thieving cabinet maker.

A chilly feeling comes over you as you look at the house. On entering
it you shiver. A greenish humidity leaks at the foot of the wall