Read "Piping Hot!" by Émile Zola online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
For some time past, Monsieur Gourd had been prowling about with an uneasy and mysterious air. He was met gliding noiselessly along, his eyes open, his ears pricked up, continually ascending the two staircases, where lodgers had even encountered him going his rounds in the dead of night. The morality of the house was certainly worrying him; he felt a kind of breath of shameful things which troubled the cold nakedness of the courtyard, the calm peacefulness of the vestibule, the beautiful domestic virtues of the different stories.
One evening, Octave had found the doorkeeper standing motionless and without a light at the end of his passage, close to the door which opened onto the servants' staircase. Greatly surprised, he questioned him.