"You don't know!" Cyprien replied, aggressively sarcastic. "Go on! I am willing to grant you may not know the number of the house; but surely you know the name of the street; you must at least know in what district it is!" M. Raindal hid his uneasiness and pretended deeply to search into his memory. "It seems to me," he replied at length, "that he lives in the avenue Kléber.... Yes, that's it, avenue Kléber." "Of course! I would have laid a bet on it!" Uncle Cyprien said victoriously. Thereupon the dreaded storm burst upon the master in a tumult of abuse and imprecations. Cyprien had effectively found the opportunity once more to air his theory of the "two banks" and he hurled it out with a crash. As a matter of fact, it was not altogether his own. The Galician had supplied the idea and Cyprien had but added the eloquent developments and the vigor of his lungs. But they had so often recited it to each other, chiseled it together and together enlarged upon it that they no longer discerned their particular share in the collaboration, and each of them claimed the authorship, whenever the other happened to be absent. According to them, Paris was composed of two cities, absolutely distinct in population, ways of life and customs. The river Seine divided these two enemy cities. On its two banks, Sion the venerable faced Gomorrah. Sion, the left bank, that was, stood for the home of virtue, science and faith. Her people were chaste, modest and diligent; they had preserved, in poverty and toil, the honest and decent national traditions. There the men were pure and the women beyond reproach. The whole inheritance of the ancestors--loyalty, devotion and high-mindedness were transmitted from fathers to sons, sheltered from the corruption of money and the shameful example of the foreigners. In sooth, it was the holy city.