only come through the street two together. It was a fairly
rackety place. And yet amid the noise and dirt lived the
usual respectable French shopkeepers, bakers and
laundresses and the like, keeping themselves to
themselves and quietly piling up small fortunes. It'was
quite a representative Paris slum.
My hotel was called the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux. It
was a dark, rickety warren of five storeys, cut up by
wooden partitions into forty rooms. The rooms were
small and inveterately dirty, for there was no maid,
and Madame F., the patronne, had no time to do any
sweeping. The walls were as thin as matchwood, and
to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer
after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and
housed innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines
of bugs marched all day like columns of soldiers,
and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that
one had to get up every few hours and kill them in
hecatombs. Sometimes when the bugs got too bad
one used to burn sulphur and drive them into the
next room; whereupon the lodger next door would
retort by having his room sulphured, and drive the
bugs back. It was a dirty place, but homelike, for
Madame F. and her husband were good sorts. The
rent of the rooms varied between thirty and fifty
francs a week.
The lodgers were a floating population, largely
foreigners, who used to turn up without luggage, stay
a week and then disappear again.