One of these Parisian Melmoths had come within a few days into a neighborhood of sober, quiet people, who, when the weather is fine, are invariably to be found in the space which lies between the south entrance of the Luxembourg and the north entrance of the Observatoire, —­a space without a name, the neutral space of Paris.  There, Paris is no longer; and there, Paris still lingers.  The spot is a mingling of street, square, boulevard, fortification, garden, avenue, high-road, province, and metropolis; certainly, all of that is to be found there, and yet the place is nothing of all that,—­it is a desert.  Around this spot without a name stand the Foundling hospital, the Bourbe, the Cochin hospital, the Capucines, the hospital La Rochefoucauld, the Deaf and Dumb Asylum, the hospital of the Val-de-Grace; in short, all the vices and all the misfortunes of Paris find their asylum there.  And (that nothing may lack in this philanthropic centre) Science there studies the tides and longitudes, Monsieur de Chateaubriand has erected the Marie-Therese Infirmary, and the Carmelites have founded a convent.  The great events of life are represented by bells which ring incessantly through this desert,—­for the mother giving birth, for the babe that is born, for the vice that succumbs, for the toiler who dies, for the virgin who prays, for the old man shaking with cold, for genius self-deluded.  And a few steps off is the cemetery of Mont-Parnasse, where, hour after hour, the sorry funerals of the faubourg Saint-Marceau wend their way.  This esplanade, which commands a view of Paris, has been taken possession of by bowl-players; it is, in fact, a sort of bowling green frequented by old gray faces, belonging to kindly, worthy men, who seem to continue the race of our ancestors, whose countenances must only be compared with those of their surroundings.

The man who had become, during the last few days, an inhabitant of this desert region, proved an assiduous attendant at these games of bowls; and must, undoubtedly, be considered the most striking creature of these various groups, who (if it is permissible to liken Parisians to the different orders of zoology) belonged to the genus mollusk.  The new-comer kept sympathetic step with the cochonnet,—­the little bowl which serves as a goal and on which the interest of the game must centre.  He leaned against a tree when the cochonnet stopped; then, with the same attention that a dog gives to his master’s gestures, he looked at the other bowls flying through the air, or rolling along the ground.  You might have taken him for the weird and watchful genii of the cochonnet.  He said nothing; and the bowl-players—­the most fanatic men that can be encountered among the sectarians of any faith —­had never asked the reason of his dogged silence; in fact, the most observing of them thought him deaf and dumb.