“Is monsieur the doctor whom Madame Cardinal expects?” asked Perrache.

Cerizet had no doubt reflected on the gravity of the affair he was undertaking, for he avoided giving an answer to that question.

“Is this the way?” he said, turning at random to one side of the courtyard.

“No, monsieur,” replied Perrache, who then took him to the back stairs of the house, which led up to the wretched attic occupied by the pauper.

Nothing remained for the inquisitive porter to do but to question the driver of the cabriolet; to which employment we will leave him, while we pursue our own inquiries elsewhere.

CHAPTER XV

THE DIFFICULTIES THAT CROP UP IN THE EASIEST OF THEFTS

The house in which Toupillier lived is one of those which have lost half their depth, owing to the straightening of the line of the street, the rue Honore-Chevalier being one of the narrowest in the Saint-Sulpice quarter.  The owner, forbidden by the law to repair it, or to add new storeys, was compelled to let the wretched building in the condition in which he bought it.  It consisted of a first storey above the ground-floor, surmounted by garrets, with two small wings running back on either side.  The courtyard thus formed ended in a garden planted with trees, which was always rented to the occupant of the first floor.  This garden, separated by an iron railing from the courtyard, would have allowed a rich owner to sell the front buildings to the city, and to build a new house upon the courtyard; but the whole of the first floor was let on an eighteen years’ lease to a mysterious personage, about whom neither the official policing of the concierge nor the curiosity of the other tenants could find anything to censure.

This tenant, now seventy years of age, had built, in 1829, an outer stairway, leading from the right wing of the first floor to the garden, so that he could get there without going through the courtyard.  Half the ground-floor was occupied by a book-stitcher, who for the last ten years had used the stable and coach-house for workshops.  A book-binder occupied the other half.  The binder and the stitcher lived, each of them, in half the garret rooms over the front building on the street.  The garrets above the rear wings were occupied, the one on the right by the mysterious tenant, the one on the left by Toupillier, who paid a hundred francs a year for it, and reached it by a dark staircase, lighted by small round windows.  The porte-cochere was made in the circular form indispensable in a street so narrow that two carriages cannot pass in it.

Cerizet laid hold of the rope which served as a baluster, to climb the species of ladder leading to the room where the so-called beggar was dying,—­a room in which the odious spectacle of pretended pauperism was being played.  In Paris, everything that is done for a purpose is thoroughly done.  Would-be paupers are as clever at mounting their disguise as shopkeepers in preparing their show-windows, or sham rich men in obtaining credit.