players; he laughed at the things which make a bourgeois laugh; talked
of what others of his kind talked about,--the arbitrary powers of
bakers who nefariously sell false weights, of the police, of the
heroic seventeen deputies of the Left. He read the "Good Sense" of the
Cure Meslier, and went to Mass; not that he had any choice between
deism and Christianity, but he took the wafer when offered to him, and
argued that he was therefore safe from the interfering claims of the
clergy. The indefatigable litigant wrote letters on this subject to
the newspapers, which the newspapers did not insert and never
answered. He was in other respects one of those estimable bourgeois
who solemnly put Christmas logs on their fire, draw kings at play,
invent April-fools, stroll on the boulevards when the weather is fine,
go to see the skating, and are always to be found on the terrace of
the Place Louis XV. at two o'clock on the days of the fireworks, with
a roll in their pockets so that they may get and keep a front place.

The Cour Batave, where the little old man lived, is the product of one
of those fantastic speculations of which no man can explain the
meaning after they are once completed. This cloistral structure, with
arcades and interior galleries built of free-stone, with a fountain at
one end,--a parched fountain, which opens its lion's mouth less to
give water than to ask it from the passers-by,--was doubtless invented
to endow the Saint-Denis quarter with a species of Palais-Royal. The
place, unhealthy and buried on all four sides by the high walls of its
houses, has no life or movement except in the daytime; it is a central
spot where dark passages meet, and connect the quarter of the markets
with the Saint-Martin quarter by means of the famous Rue Quincampoix,
--damp ways in which hurried foot-passengers contract rheumatism. But
at night no spot in Paris is more deserted; it might be called the
catacombs of commerce. In it there are various industrial _cloaca_,