Any one passing along the Rue de Normandie might be pardoned for thinking that he was in some small provincial town.  Grass runs to seed in the street, everybody knows everybody else, and the sight of a stranger is an event.  The houses date back to the reign of Henry IV., when there was a scheme afoot for a quarter in which every street was to be named after a French province, and all should converge in a handsome square to which La France should stand godmother.  The Quartier de l’Europe was a revival of the same idea; history repeats itself everywhere in the world, and even in the world of speculation.

The house in which the two musicians used to live is an old mansion with a courtyard in front and a garden at the back; but the front part of the house which gives upon the street is comparatively modern, built during the eighteenth century when the Marais was a fashionable quarter.  The friends lived at the back, on the second floor of the old part of the house.  The whole building belongs to M. Pillerault, an old man of eighty, who left matters very much in the hands of M. and Mme. Cibot, his porters for the past twenty-six years.

Now, as a porter cannot live by his lodge alone, the aforesaid Cibot had other means of gaining a livelihood; and supplemented his five per cent on the rental and his faggot from every cartload of wood by his own earnings as a tailor.  In time Cibot ceased to work for the master tailors; he made a connection among the little trades-people of the quarter, and enjoyed a monopoly of the repairs, renovations, and fine drawing of all the coats and trousers in three adjacent streets.  The lodge was spacious and wholesome, and boasted a second room; wherefore the Cibot couple were looked upon as among the luckiest porters in the arrondissement.

Cibot, small and stunted, with a complexion almost olive-colored by reason of sitting day in day out in Turk-fashion on a table level with the barred window, made about twelve or fourteen francs a week.  He worked still, though he was fifty-eight years old, but fifty-eight is the porter’s golden age; he is used to his lodge, he and his room fit each other like the shell and the oyster, and “he is known in the neighborhood.”

Mme. Cibot, sometime opener of oysters at the Cadran Bleu, after all the adventures which come unsought to the belle of an oyster-bar, left her post for love of Cibot at the age of twenty-eight.  The beauty of a woman of the people is short-lived, especially if she is planted espalier fashion at a restaurant door.  Her features are hardened by puffs of hot air from the kitchen; the color of the heeltaps of customers’ bottles, finished in the company of the waiters, gradually filters into her complexion—­no beauty is full blown so soon as the beauty of an oyster-opener.  Luckily for Mme. Cibot, lawful wedlock and a portress’ life were offered to her just in time; while she still preserved a comeliness of a masculine order slandered