been the Paris home of the Archbishops of Rouen—a packed, crowded, noisy alley where mansions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lean against each other for mutual support; where the windows are spotted with bird-cages and linen hung out to dry and the frowzy heads of housewives; where there is no verdure except an occasional sickly fig-tree straggling along a rusty, bent water-pipe, and here and there a dusty bit of clematis and convolvulus stretching up—a neighborhood echoing to the shrill sounds and shouts of its motley population, news-venders and fruiterers, bookbinders and cobblers, dealers in all kinds of second-hand odds and ends, locksmiths and knife-sharpeners—a neighborhood made yet more noisy with the screams and laughter and jests of a school for little girls who file through the alley twice a day, copy-books and satchels under their arms.
Indeed, an alley clanking and beating with life!
And Prince Pavel Narodkine moved in, together with his armed peasant retainers—while Paris sat on its haunches and waited developments.
There were none.
Prince Pavel Narodkine lived in his little house .of the Cour de Rouen as he had lived in the Hotel
