which yet boasted the mediæval gutter
—a Niagara of mud—which were villanous
in aspect, and vile in smell. The lantern of
the rag-picker crossed our path like a Will-
o'-the-wisp, viragoes quarrelled at the doors
of charcoal-sheds, portefaix tottered by with
gigantic sacks, like corpses, on their backs;
that novelty in civilised Paris, the drunken
man, staggered out of the wine-shop, and
asked us, hiccuping, what o'clock it was;
and now and then some great lumbering
omnibus with red eyes like a blood-shot
demon's swooped by, driving us against the
wall, and casting mud into our teeth. I
was just on the point of revolting, and telling
Lobb that I would see his beef hung before
I would go any further, when he stopped
(the cautious man was enveloped in water-
proofing, and I had a great coat like a
sponge), and said,

"Dis is de peef shop."

We passed under a scowling archway, into
a court-yard, seemingly opening into half-a-
dozen others. There was some gas about;
but the dust must have permeated the pipes,
for it blinked and glimmered dubiously,
and seemed disposed to burn blue. Every-
where on the wall, from the basement to
where the hideous height of stone and plaster
was lost in darkness, there were stuck those
bewildering placards about the names and
occupations of the tenants of the different
floors, that drive a man mad at Paris, and
send him up to the sixth storey in quest of a
tailor who lives on the ground floor. Of
course there was a hairdresser in the house;
of course there were "modes" on the second
floor; of course there was a dentist, whose
hideous armoury of dead men's fangs and waxen
gums grinned at you from a glass case; of
course there was a professor of photography
together with the depôt of some societé
générale for the sale of medicated chocolate,
or camphorated pomatum, hygienic asphalte,
Athenian eye-water, philanthropic corn-plaster,
or similar egregious excrescences of
civilisation. No French house could be
complete without those branches of industry.
But the beef was in the second floor along
with the modes; at least a hot, drowsy, meaty
smell began in the court-yard,and ended there;
so I followed it and Lobb, irrigating the stairs
involuntarily as I went with the drippings
from my garments.

I did not arrive in the most joyous
frame of mind; my very appetite was
washed out of me. Nor did it increase my
jocundity of mood, when—pushing aside a
green baize-covered door—Lobb preceded me
into a bleak ante-chamber, very cold and
barren, where there were some bare deal
board on tressels and a cemetery of empty
bottles.

"Sometime dey are zo vull, we dine here,"
whispered Lobb.

I shuddered. I would as soon have dined
in a dead-house. But there was a curtain
hanging across a doorway, which he drew
aside, and then I entered into the real temple
where the beef was to be.

Silence, deep, dead, marrow-freezing
silence! From the fifty guests or so, at
least; but, from their fifty knives and
forks a dull clicking; and, now and then,
some smothered sounds of gurgling, and,
once in every five minutes on an average,
subdued clatter of plates. But not a word.
Motus.

There were an outer and an inner saloon,
vast, lofty, well-proportioned; but indescribably
faded, tarnished. On the old grimy
walls, bedewed with the tears of generations
of damp, there were here and there
painted panels, surrounded by festoons of
ghastly flowers; and, in the panels, were
mildewed Cupids, and cracked shepherds
making love to washed-out shepherdesses.
There were gilt cornices; and, on the ceiling
was painted the apotheosis of somebody,
obscured, bleared, almost undiscoverable beneath
the smoke of a century, and the fumes of a
hecatomb of beef. There was a mirror
over one mantel, surrounded by obsolete
framework; and, on the shelf, a lugubrious
clock, with a heavy mass of carving
representing Orestes pursued by the Eumenides,
or Clytemnestra slaying Agamemnon, or some
equally lively classical episode, ticked
dolorously. There were four long tables covered
with doubtful table-cloths; three full of
guests eating with gloomy avidity, the fourth
empty. Dim oil lamps burnt around. Nobody
offered us a seat; nobody seemed to
acknowledge our presence; no waiter so much
as looked at us. One man only, a bald-
headed biped in a long coat, who was standing
by the funereal clock, took out an ebony
snuff-box, just glanced at me, as if to tell me
that if I thought he were about to offer me a
pinch, I was very much mistaken, took a
double pinch himself and sneezed. By Lobb's
direction I took a seat at the vacant table, as
near the centre as possible. From minute to
minute there dropped in men in cloaks, men
in paletots, men in spencers, men in many-
collared carricks. Some were decorated; a
few wore moustaches; but the vast majority
were old and clean shaven, and looked like
men of the first empire. One little old man,
with a round scalp polished like a billiard
ball, wore a coat-collar of unusual height
and stiffness, for the purpose, I believe to
this day, of concealing a pigtail, which he
persisted in wearing, but was ashamed to
show. Nobody took any notice of us; they
did not even bring ns bread or wine. There
were knives and forks and napkins, but
one cannot eat these things. This could
not be a dining-house. It was the Silent
Tomb.

It was, in sober reality, though it looked so
much like a family vault, a table d'hôte at
thirty-six sous, held in a dilapidated ci-devant
nobleman's mansion, and of the order of