Monsieur Bergeret in Paris by Anatole France

Upon Monsieur Bergeret's arrival in Paris, with his daughter Pauline and his sister Zoe, he had lodged in a house which was soon to be pulled down, and which he began to like as soon as he knew that he could not remain in it. He was unaware of the fact that in any case he would have left it at the same time. Mademoiselle Bergeret had made up her mind as to that. She had taken these rooms only to give herself time to find better, and was opposed to the spending of any money upon the place.

It was a house in the Rue de Seine, a hundred years old at least. Never beautiful, it had grown uglier with age. The _porte cochère_ opened humbly on a damp courtyard between a shoemaker's shop and a carrier's office. Monsieur Bergeret's rooms were on the second floor, and on the same floor lived a picture-restorer through whose open door glimpses could be caught of little unframed canvases set about an earthenware stove, landscapes, old portraits, and an amber-skinned woman asleep in a dark wood under a green sky. The staircase was fairly well lighted. Cobwebs hung in the corners, and at the turns the wooden stairs were embellished with tiles. Stray lettuce-leaves, dropped from some housewife's string bag, were to be found there of a morning.