The stove was lighted; the water in the copper was steaming slightly.  A painted wooden closet or wardrobe contained, no doubt, the linen and clothing of Monsieur Bernard’s daughter.  On the old man’s bed Godefroid noticed that the habiliments he had worn the night before lay spread as a covering.  The floor, evidently seldom swept, looked like that of a boy’s class-room.  A six-pound loaf of bread, from which some slices had been cut, was on a shelf above the table.  Here was poverty in its last stages, poverty resolutely accepted with stern endurance, making shift with the lowest and poorest means.  A strong and sickening odor came from this room, which was rarely cleaned.

The antechamber, in which Godefroid stood, was at any rate decent, and he suspected that it served to conceal the horrors of the room in which the grandfather and the grandson lived.  This antechamber, hung with a checked paper of Scotch pattern, held four walnut chairs, a small table, a colored engraving of the Emperor after Horace Vernet, also portraits of Louis XVIII., Charles X., and Prince Poniatowski, no doubt the friend of Monsieur Bernard’s father-in-law.  The window was draped with white calico curtains edged with red bands and fringe.

Godefroid watched for Nepomucene, and when the latter made his next trip with wood signed to him to stack it very gently in Monsieur Bernard’s antechamber; then (a perception which proved some progress in our initiate) he closed the door of the inner lair that Madame Vauthier’s slave might not see the old man’s squalor.

The antechamber was just then encumbered with three plant-stands filled with plants; two were oblong, one round, all three were of a species of ebony and of great elegance; even Nepomucene took notice of them and said as he deposited the wood:—­

“Hey! ain’t they pretty?  They must have cost a good bit!”

“Jean! don’t make so much noise!” called Monsieur Bernard from his daughter’s room.

“Did you hear that?” whispered Nepomucene to Godefroid.  “He’s cracked, for sure, that old fellow.”

“You don’t know what you may be at his age.”

“Yes, I do know,” responded Nepomucene, “I shall be in the sugar-bowl.”

“The sugar-bowl?”

“Yes, they’ll have made my bones into charcoal by that time; I often see the carts of the refineries coming to Montsouris for charcoal; they tell me they make sugar of it.”  And he departed after another load of wood, satisfied with this philosophical reflection.

Godefroid discreetly withdrew to his own rooms, closing Monsieur Bernard’s door behind him.  Madame Vauthier, who during this time had been preparing her new lodger’s breakfast, now came up to serve it, attended by Felicite.  Godefroid, lost in reflection, stared into his fire.  He was absorbed in meditation on this great misery which contained so many different miseries, and yet within which he could see the ineffable joys of the many triumphs of paternal and filial love; they were gems shining in the blackness of the pit.