The Rue Grenetat is a street where all the houses, crowded with trades of every kind, have a repulsive aspect.  The buildings are horrible.  The vile uncleanliness of manufactories is their leading feature.  Old Gigonnet lived on the third floor of a house whose window-sashes, with small and very dirty panes, swung by the middle, on pivots.  The staircase opened directly upon the street.  The porter’s lodge was on the entresol, in a space which was lighted only from the staircase.  All the lodgers, with the exception of Gigonnet, worked at trades.  Workmen were continually coming and going.  The stairs were caked with a layer of mud, hard or soft according to the state of the atmosphere, and were covered with filth.  Each landing of this noisome stairway bore the names of the occupants in gilt letters on a metal plate, painted red and varnished, to which were attached specimens of their craft.  As a rule, the doors stood open and gave to view queer combinations of the domestic household and the manufacturing operations.  Strange cries and grunts issued therefrom, with songs and whistles and hisses that recalled the hour of four o’clock in the Jardin des Plantes.  On the first floor, in an evil-smelling lair, the handsomest braces to be found in the article-Paris were made.  On the second floor, the elegant boxes which adorn the shop-windows of the boulevards and the Palais-Royal at the beginning of the new year were manufactured, in the midst of the vilest filth.  Gigonnet eventually died, worth eighteen hundred thousand francs, on a third floor of this house, from which no consideration could move him; though his niece, Madame Saillard, offered to give him an appartement in a hotel in the Place Royalle.

“Courage!” said Pillerault, as he pulled the deer’s hoof hanging from the bell-rope of Gigonnet’s clean gray door.

Gigonnet opened the door himself.  Cesar’s two supporters, entering the precincts of bankruptcy, crossed the first room, which was clean and chilly and without curtains to its windows.  All three sat down in the inner room where the money-lender lived, before a hearth full of ashes, in the midst of which the wood was successfully defending itself against the fire.  Popinot’s courage froze at sight of the usurer’s green boxes and the monastic austerity of the room, whose atmosphere was like that of a cellar.  He looked with a wondering eye at the miserable blueish paper sprinkled with tricolor flowers, which had been on the walls for twenty-five years; and then his anxious glance fell upon the chimney-piece, ornamented with a clock shaped like a lyre, and two oval vases in Sevres blue richly mounted in copper-gilt.  This relic, picked up by Gigonnet after the pillage of Versailles, where the populace broke nearly everything, came from the queen’s boudoir; but these rare vases were flanked by two candelabra of abject shape made of wrought-iron, and the barbarous contrast recalled the circumstances under which the vases had been acquired.