Black - 1895 Author:Alexandre Dumas Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. THE EXTEEIOR AND THE INTERIOR OF THE HOME OF THE CHEVALIER DE LA GRAVERIE. Number 9 Rue de Lices consisted of a house, a garden, and a court. The ... more »building was situated between the garden and the court, but not, as usual, with the court in front and the garden in the rear. No; the court was at the left, and the garden at the right. Flanked by court and garden, the house faced the street. In the court, by which one ordinarily entered, the sole ornament found was an old vine, which, not having been cut back for ten years, covered the gable of its neighbor, the house against which it leaned, with shoots whose vigor recalled to mind the virgin forests of the new world. Although the court was paved with stone, the grass, favored by the moisture of the soil and the shade of the roofs, had sprung up so thickly, so abundantly, in the interstices as to form a sort of chess-board in relief, whose squares were represented by the stones. Unfortunately, the Chevalier de la Graverie, being a player of neither chess nor draughts, had never thought to take advantage of this circumstance, which might have formed the happiness of Mery or M. Labourdonnais. Outside, the house had the cold, sad aspect characteristic of most of the dwellings of our old towns. The plaster with which it had once been coated had scaled off in large patches, revealing the ashlar-like nature of thestructure, covered here and there with laths nailed side by side; this imparted to the front the appearance of a face spotted over with a skin disease. The windows, bereft of their grayish paint and black with age, were fitted with small panes economically chosen from bottle- glass, — panes that served to admit only a greenish light into the apartments. Had one but crossed the court and paused at the grou...« less