Indeed, if it had been a fair day, my adventure could scarcely have befallen. I should have been abroad, in the garden or the forest, playing with André, our farmer’s son; angling, with a bit of red worsted as bait, for frogs in the pond; trying to catch lizards on the terrace; lying under a tree with Don Quixote or Le Capitaine Fracasse; visiting Manuela in her cottage; or perhaps, best of all, spending the afternoon with Hélène, at Granjolaye. It was because the rain interdicted these methods of amusement that I betook myself for solace to Constantinople. I don’t know why—I don’t think any one knew why—that part of our house was called Constantinople; but it had been called so from time immemorial, and we all accepted it as a matter of course. It was the topmost story of the East Wing—three rooms: one little room, by way of ante-chamber, into which you entered from a corkscrew staircase; then another little room at your left; and then a big room, a long dim room, with only two windows, one at either end. And these rooms served as a sort of Hades for departed household gods. They were crowded, crowded to overflowing, with such wonderful old things! Old furniture—old straight-backed chairs, old card-tables, with green cloth tops, and brass claws for feet, old desks and cabinets, the dismembered relics of old four-post bedsteads; old clothes—old hats, boots, cloaks—green silk calashes, like bonnets meant for the ladies of Brobdingnag—and old hoop-petticoats, the skeletons of dead toilets; old books, newspapers, pictures; old lamps and candlesticks, clocks, fire-irons, vases; an old sedan-chair; old spurs, old swords, old guns and pistols; generations upon generations of superannuated utilities and vanities, slumbering in one another’s shadows, under a common sheet of dust, and giving off a thin, penetrating, ancient smell.