I must find handy in my dressing-room.
In short, I myself am nothing but the centre
of a vast medical litter, and the closer the
said litter revolves round me the more
comfortable I am. In a house of the usual size,
and in rooms arranged on the ordinary plan,
I should be driven distracted (being an
untidy man even in my healthiest moments)
by mislaying things every hour in the day, by
having to get up to look for them, and by
being compelled to walk up and down stairs,
or to make others do so for me, when I want
to establish communications between dressing-room,
bedroom, drawing-room, coal-cellar,
and kitchen. In my tiny Parisian house of
one small storey I can wait on myself with
the most perfect ease; in my wee sitting-room
nine-tenths of the things I want are
within arm's length of me, as I repose in
my elbow-chair; if I must move I can get
from my bed-chamber to my kitchen in less
time than it would take me to walk across
an English drawing-room; if I lose my
morning draught, mislay my noontide drops,
or leave my evening pill-box under my afternoon
dressing-gown, I can take my walking-stick
or my fire-tongs, and poke or fish for
missing articles in every corner of the room,
without doing more than turning round in my
chair. If I had been well and had given
dinner parties, I might have found my
habitation rather too small for me. As it is, if
my Pavilion had been built on purpose for a
solitary lodger to fall ill in with the least
possible amount of personal discomfort, it could
not have suited my sad case better. Sick, I
love and honour the skilful architect who
contrived it—well, I am very much afraid I
should never have bestowed so much as a
single thought on him.

Why do I become, in one cordial quarter
of an hour, friendly, familiar, and (in my
present weak way) affectionate, even, with
my portress? Because I find, at our very
first interview, that she is honestly sorry to
see me deprived of all my anticipated
Parisian pleasures, and sincerely anxious to
soften my hard fate by every means in her
power. It is, I suppose, part of my
unhealthy condition of body and mind, that I
like nothing so well as being pitied. My
portress sweetens my daily existence with so
much compassion that she does me more
good, I think, than my doctor or my drugs.
She is a thin, rapid, cheerful, little woman,
with a tiny face and bright brown eyes. She has
a husband (Mon Mari) and a son (Le Gamin),
and a lodge of one room to live in with her
family. She has not been in bed, for years
past, before two or three in the morning; for
my Pavilion and the second Pavilion opposite
and the large house behind, are all shut in
from the roadway by handsome iron gates,
which it is the business of somebody in the
porter's lodge to open (by pulling a string
communicating with the latch) at all hours
of the night to homeward-bound lodgers.
The large house has so many tenants that
some one is always out at a party or a
theatre—so the keeping of late hours
becomes a necessary part of the service in the
lodge, and the poor little portress is the
victim who suffers as perpetual night-watch.
Mon Mari (an estimable man, for whom I
have a high respect and regard, having found
him assiduous and compassionate) absorbs
his fair share of work in the day, and takes
the early-rising department cheerfully, but
he does not possess the gift of keeping awake
at night. By eleven o'clock (such is sometimes
the weakness even of the most amiable
human nature) it is necessary that Mon Mari
should be stretched on his back on the
nuptial bedstead, snoring impervious to all
sounds and all in-comers. Le Gamin, or the
son, is too young to be trusted with the
supervision of the gate-string. He sleeps,
sound as his father, with a half-developed
snore and a coiled-up body, in a crib at the
foot of the parental bed. On the other side
of the room, hard by the lodger's keys and
candlesticks, with a big stove behind her
and a gaslight before her eyes, sits the faithful
little portress, watching out the weary hours as
wakefully as she can. She trusts entirely to
strong coffee and the near flare of the
gaslight to combat the natural sleepiness which
follows a hard day's work begun at eight
o'clock every morning. The coffee and the
gas deserve, to a certain extent, the confidence
she places in them. They keep her
bright brown eyes very wide open, staring
with unwinking pertinacity at the light
before them. They keep her back very straight
against her chair, and her arms crossed
tightly over her bosom, and her feet set
firmly on her footstool. But though they
stop sleep from shutting her eyes or relaxing
her limbs, they cannot prevent some few
latent Morphian influences from stealthily
reaching her. Open as her eyes may be,
the little woman nevertheless does start
guiltily when the ring at the bell comes at
last; does stare fixedly for a moment before
she can get up; has to fight resolutely with
something drowsy and clinging in the shape
of a trance, before she can fly to the latch-
string, and hang on to it wearily, instead of
pulling at it with the proper wakeful jerk.
Night after night she has now drunk the
strong coffee, and propped herself up stiffly
in her straight chair, and stared hard at the
flaring gas-light, for nearly seven years past.
Some people would have lost their tempers
and their spirits under these hard
circumstances; but the cheerful little portress has
only lost her flesh. In a dark corner of
the room hangs a daguerreotype likeness.
It represents a buxom woman, with round
cheeks and a sturdy waist, and dates from
the period when she was the bride of Mon
Mari, and was thinking of following him
into the Porter's Lodge. " Ah! my dear
sir," she says when I condole with her, "if