Monte-Cristo had evidently visited the Ghetto before, as he seemed thoroughly familiar with its crooked lanes and obscure byways, pursuing his course without hesitation or pause for inquiry. It apparently contained no new sights or surprises for him. To M. Morrel, on the contrary, who now was within its walls for the first time, it presented an unending series of wonders. The buildings particularly impressed him. They looked as if erected away back in remote antiquity, and were curiously quaint combinations of wood and stone, exceedingly picturesque in appearance. Most of them were not more than eight or ten feet wide and towered to a height of four stories, resembling dwarfed steeples rather than houses. Not a new or modern edifice was to be seen in any direction. Many of the buildings were in a ruinous condition and some seemed actually about to crumble to pieces, while here and there great piles of shapeless rubbish marked the spots where others had fallen. As they were passing one of these piles, much larger than the rest, Maximilian called Monte-Cristo's attention to it. The Count glanced at it and said: "That was once the dwelling of old Isaac Nabal, known to his people as Isaac the Moneylender, but styled by the Romans Isaac the Usurer. He was enormously rich and loaned his gold at exorbitant rates to the extravagant and impecunious Roman nobles. Isaac was wifeless and childless, but so eager for gain was he that he kept his house constantly filled with lodgers. The house was perhaps the oldest in all the Ghetto. Strange noises were heard in it every night occasioned by the falling of plaster or partition walls. It was no uncommon thing for a lodger to be suddenly roused from his sleep by a crash and find himself bruised and bleeding. Still old Isaac sturdily refused to make repairs. He asserted that the rickety edifice would last as long as he did, and he was not wrong, for one night it came down bodily about his ears and he perished amid the ruins together with thirty others, all who were in the aged rookery at the time. This catastrophe happened twenty years ago."
"Do the houses often fall here?" asked M. Morrel, glancing uneasily around him at the dilapidated buildings.
"Very often," answered the Count. "Age and decay will bring them all down sooner or later."
"Then for Heaven's sake let us hasten lest we be crushed beneath some sudden wreck!" said Maximilian. "The houses project over the street at the upper stories until they almost join each other in mid air. If one should fall there would be no escape!"