"Yes, and in spite of it all, I am glad to have her."
As they talked they had reached the entrance to the Bishop's residence. They went through a little gate by the lodge into a large forecourt strewn with small river pebbles, in front of a vast building of the seventeenth century. There were no flowers of stone-work, no sculpture, no decorative doorways--nothing but a frontage of shabby brick and stone, a bare, uninviting structure evidently neglected, with tall windows, behind which the shutters could be seen, painted grey. The entrance was on the level of the first floor; double outside steps led up to the door, and under the landing, in the arch below, there was a glass door, through which, framed in the square, could be seen the trunks of trees beyond.
This courtyard was bordered with tall poplars, which the late Bishop, who had frequented the Tuileries, used to speak of with a smile as his hundred guards.
Madame Bavoil and Durtal crossed this forecourt, sloping to the left towards a wing of the building, roofed with slate.
There, on the first floor, with only a loft above lighted by round dormers, lived the Abbé Gévresin.
They went up a narrow staircase with a rusty iron balustrade. The walls were trickling with damp, they secreted drops, distilled spots like black coffee; the steps were worn hollow, and thin at the ends like spoons; they led up to a door smeared yellow, with a cast-iron knob as black as ink. A copper ring swung in the wind at the end of a bell-rope, knocking the chipped plaster of the wall. An indescribable smell of stale apples and stagnant water came up the middle of the staircase from the little outer hall below, which was paved with rows of bricks set on edge, eaten into patterns like madrepores, while the ceiling looked like a map, furrowed with seas that were traced in yellow by the soaking through of the rain.
And the Abbé's little apartment, lately "done up" with a vile red-checked paper, reeked of the tomb. It was evident that under the shadow of the Cathedral that overhung this wing no sunshine ever dried the walls, of which the skirting boards were rotting into powder like brown sugar, crumbling slowly, on the icy cold polish of the floor.