The floor had never been swept; the bricks had disappeared beneath layers of dirt, dust, dried mud, and any and every thing thrown down by Toupillier.  A miserable stove of cast-iron, the pipe of which entered a crumbling chimney, was the most apparent piece of furniture in this hovel.  In an alcove stood a bed, with tester and valence of green serge, which the moths had transformed into lace.  The window, almost useless, had a heavy coating of grease upon its panes, which dispensed with the necessity of curtains.  The whitewashed walls presented to the eye fuliginous tones, due to the wood and peat burned by the pauper in his stove.  On the fireplace were a broken water-pitcher, two bottles, and a cracked plate.  A worm-eaten chest of drawers contained his linen and decent clothes.  The rest of the furniture consisted of a night-table of the commonest description, another table, worth about forty sous, and two kitchen chairs with the straw seats almost gone.  The extremely picturesque costume of the centenarian pauper was hanging from a nail, and below it, on the floor, were the shapeless mat-weed coverings that served him for shoes, the whole forming, with his amorphous old hat and knotty stick, a sort of panoply of misery.

As he entered, Cerizet gave a rapid glance at the old man, whose head lay on a pillow brown with grease and without a pillow-case; his angular profile, like those which engravers of the last century were fond of making out of rocks in the landscapes they engraved, was strongly defined in black against the green serge hangings of the tester.  Toupillier, a man nearly six feet tall, was looking fixedly at some object at the foot of his bed; he did not move on hearing the groaning of the heavy door, which, being armed with iron bolts and a strong lock, closed his domicile securely.

“Is he conscious?” said Cerizet, before whom Madame Cardinal started back, not having recognized him till he spoke.

“Pretty nearly,” she replied.

“Come out on the staircase, so that he doesn’t hear us,” whispered Cerizet.  “This is how we’ll manage it,” he continued, in the ear of his future mother-in-law.  “He is weak, but he isn’t so very low; we have fully a week before us.  I’ll send you a doctor who’ll suit us, —­you understand? and later in the evening I’ll bring you six poppy-heads.  In the state he’s in, you see, a decoction of poppy-heads will send him into a sound sleep.  I’ll send you a cot-bed on pretence of your sleeping in the room with him.  We’ll move him from one bed to the other, and when we’ve found the money there won’t be any difficulty in carrying it off.  But we ought to know who the people are who live in this old barrack.  If Perrache suspects, as you think, about the money, he might give an alarm, and so many tenants, so many spies, you know—­”

“Oh! as for that,” said Madame Cardinal, “I’ve found out already that Monsieur du Portail, the old man who occupies the first floor, has charge of an insane woman; I heard their Dutch servant-woman, Katte, calling her Lydie this morning.  The only other servant is an old valet named Bruneau; he does everything, except cook.”