In a very short time he had reached the corner of the Rue de Bellechasse, and a few moments later he found himself before the great doors of the strange house in which Larcher had taken up his abode. Pushing these open, he entered an immense courtyard in which everything spoke of desolation, from the grass that grew between the stones to the cobwebs that covered the windows of the deserted stables on the left. At the bottom of the courtyard stood a noble mansion, built in the reign of Louis XIV., and bearing the proud motto of the Saint-Euvertes, whose town house this had been, _Fortiter._ The stones of this building, already bearing traces of the ravages of time, its long shuttered windows and its silence were all in harmony with the solitude of the courtyard. The old Faubourg Saint-Germain contains many such houses, strange as the destiny of their owners, and which will always prove peculiarly attractive to minds in search of the psychologically picturesque--if we may unite these two words to define an almost indefinable shade of meaning. René had heard the history of this mansion from his friend; how the old Marquis de Saint-Euverte, reduced to despair by the almost simultaneous loss of his wife, his three daughters, and their husbands, had, six years ago, gone to live with his grandsons on his estates in Poitou. An epidemic of typhoid fever suddenly breaking out in a small watering-place where all the family were staying together had made this happy old man the lonely guardian of a tribe of orphans. Even during the lifetime of the Marquise--an excellent business woman--two small wings in the house had been let to quiet tenants. These wings had also a history of their own, the grandfather of the present Marquis having placed them at the disposal of two cousins--Knights of Saint-Louis and at one time political refugees--who, after a wretched, wandering existence, had ended their days here. M. de Saint-Euverte had left everything as his wife had arranged it. Claude therefore one day found himself the only tenant in the whole of this silent, gloomy building, for the occupant of the other wing had been scared away by the loneliness of the place, and no one else had yet seemed anxious to bury himself in this tomb, standing between a desolate courtyard and a still more desolate garden.