CHAPTER IV.  RESEARCHES IN ARCHÆOLOGY.

 Six months later they had become archæologists, and their house was like a museum.

In the vestibule stood an old wooden beam. The staircase was encumbered with the geological specimens, and an enormous chain was stretched on the ground all along the corridor. They had taken off its hinges the door between the two rooms in which they did not sleep, and had condemned the outer door of the second in order to convert both into a single apartment.

As soon as you crossed the threshold, you came in contact with a stone trough (a Gallo-Roman sarcophagus); the ironwork next attracted your attention. Fixed to the opposite wall, a warming-pan looked down on two andirons and a hearthplate representing a monk caressing a shepherdess. On the boards all around, you saw torches, locks, bolts, and nuts of screws. The floor was rendered invisible beneath fragments of red tiles. A table in the centre exhibited curiosities of the rarest description: the shell of a Cauchoise cap, two argil urns, medals, and a phial of opaline glass. An upholstered armchair had at its back a triangle worked with guipure. A piece of a coat of mail adorned the partition to the right, and on the other side sharp spikes sustained in a horizontal position a unique specimen of a halberd.

The second room, into which two steps led down, contained the old books which they had brought with them from Paris, and those which, on their arrival, they had found in a press. The leaves of the folding-doors had been removed hither. They called it the library.

The back of the door was entirely covered by the genealogical tree of the Croixmare family. In the panelling on the return side, a pastel of a lady in the dress of the period of Louis XV. made a companion picture to the portrait of Père Bouvard. The casing of the glass was decorated with a sombrero of black felt, and a monstrous galoche filled with leaves, the remains of a nest.

Two cocoanuts (which had belonged to Pécuchet since his younger days) flanked on the chimney-piece an earthenware cask on which a peasant sat astride. Close by, in a straw basket, was a little coin brought up by a duck.

In front of the bookcase stood a shell chest of drawers trimmed with plush. The cover of it supported a cat with a mouse in its mouth--a petrifaction from St. Allyre; a work-box, also of shell work, and on this box a decanter of brandy contained a Bon Chrétien pear.

But the finest thing was a statue of St. Peter in the embrasure of the window. His right hand, covered with a glove of apple-green colour, was pressing the key of Paradise. His chasuble, ornamented with fleurs-de-luce, was azure blue, and his tiara very yellow, pointed like a pagoda. He had flabby cheeks, big round eyes, a gaping mouth, and a crooked nose sha