[The Vicomte de Bragelonne by Alexandre Dumas Pere]@TWC D-Link bookThe Vicomte de Bragelonne CHAPTER LII 6/11
Oh! what a pretty old house!" "The sign Notre Dame; it is an old _cabaret_, which I have transformed into a private house in two days." "But the _cabaret_ is still open ?" "_Pardieu!_" "And where do you lodge, then ?" "I? I lodge with Planchet." "You said, just now, 'This is my house.'" "I said so, because, in fact, it is my house.
I have bought it." "Ah!" said Raoul. "At ten years' purchase, my dear Raoul; a superb affair; I bought the house for thirty thousand livres; it has a garden which opens to the Rue de la Mortillerie; the _cabaret_ lets for a thousand livres, with the first story; the garret, or second floor, for five hundred livres." "Indeed!" "Yes, indeed." "Five hundred livres for a garret? Why, it is not habitable." "Therefore no one inhabits it; only, you see, this garret has two windows which look out upon the Place." "Yes, monsieur." "Well, then, every time anybody is broken on the wheel or hung, quartered, or burnt, these two windows let for twenty pistoles." "Oh!" said Raoul, with horror. "It is disgusting, is it not ?" said D'Artagnan. "Oh!" repeated Raoul. "It is disgusting, but so it is.
These Parisian cockneys are sometimes real anthropophagi.
I cannot conceive how men, Christians, can make such speculation. "That is true." "As for myself," continued D'Artagnan, "if I inhabited that house, on days of execution I would shut it up to the very keyholes; but I do not inhabit it." "And you let the garret for five hundred livres ?" "To the ferocious _cabaretier_, who sub-lets it.
I said, then, fifteen hundred livres." "The natural interest of money," said Raoul,--"five per cent." "Exactly so.
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