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_ Forty years ago, a rambler who had ventured into that unknown
country of the Salpetriere, and who had mounted to the Barriere
d'Italie by way of the boulevard, reached a point where it might
be said that Paris disappeared. It was no longer solitude,
for there were passers-by; it was not the country, for there were
houses and streets; it was not the city, for the streets had ruts
like highways, and the grass grew in them; it was not a village,
the houses were too lofty. What was it, then? It was an inhabited
spot where there was no one; it was a desert place where there was
some one; it was a boulevard of the great city, a street of Paris;
more wild at night than the forest, more gloomy by day than a cemetery.
It was the old quarter of the Marche-aux-Chevaux.
The rambler, if he risked himself outside the four decrepit walls
of this Marche-aux-Chevaux; if he consented even to pass beyond
the Rue du Petit-Banquier, after leaving on his right a garden
protected by high walls; then a field in which tan-bark mills rose
like gigantic beaver huts; then an enclosure encumbered with timber,
with a heap of stumps, sawdust, and shavings, on which stood
a large dog, barking; then a long, low, utterly dilapidated wall,
with a little black door in mourning, laden with mosses,
which were covered with flowers in the spring; then, in the most
deserted spot, a frightful and decrepit building, on which ran
the inscription in large letters: POST NO BILLS,--this daring
rambler would have reached little known latitudes at the corner
of the Rue des Vignes-Saint-Marcel. There, near a factory,
and between two garden walls, there could be seen, at that epoch,
a mean building, which, at the first glance, seemed as small as a
thatched hovel, and which was, in reality, as large as a cathedral.
It presented its side and gable to the public road; hence its
apparent diminutiveness. Nearly the whole of the house was hidden.
Only the door and one window could be seen.
This hovel was only one story high.
The first detail that struck the observer was, that the door could
never have been anything but the door of a hovel, while the window,
if it had been carved out of dressed stone instead of being in
rough masonry, might have been the lattice of a lordly mansion.
The door was nothing but a collection of worm-eaten planks roughly
bound together by cross-beams which resembled roughly hewn logs.
It opened directly on a steep staircase of lofty steps, muddy,
chalky, plaster-stained, dusty steps, of the same width as itself,
which could be seen from the street, running straight up like a
ladder and disappearing in the darkness between two walls. The top
of the shapeless bay into which this door shut was masked by a narrow
scantling in the centre of which a triangular hole had been sawed,
which served both as wicket and air-hole when the door was closed.
On the inside of the door the figures 52 had been traced with a
couple of strokes of a brush dipped in ink, and above the scantling
the same hand had daubed the number 50, so that one hesitated.
Where was one? Above the door it said, "Number 50"; the inside replied,
"no, Number 52." No one knows what dust-colored figures were
suspended like draperies from the triangular opening.
The window was large, sufficiently elevated, garnished with
Venetian blinds, and with a frame in large square panes;
only these large panes were suffering from various wounds,
which were both concealed and betrayed by an ingenious paper bandage.
And the blinds, dislocated and unpasted, threatened passers-by
rather than screened the occupants. The horizontal slats were
missing here and there and had been naively replaced with boards
nailed on perpendicularly; so that what began as a blind ended
as a shutter. This door with an unclean, and this window with
an honest though dilapidated air, thus beheld on the same house,
produced the effect of two incomplete beggars walking side by side,
with different miens beneath the same rags, the one having
always been a mendicant, and the other having once been a gentleman.
The staircase led to a very vast edifice which resembled a shed
which had been converted into a house. This edifice had, for its
intestinal tube, a long corridor, on which opened to right and left
sorts of compartments of varied dimensions which were inhabitable
under stress of circumstances, and rather more like stalls than cells.
These chambers received their light from the vague waste grounds
in the neighborhood.
All this was dark, disagreeable, wan, melancholy, sepulchral;
traversed according as the crevices lay in the roof or in the door,
by cold rays or by icy winds. An interesting and picturesque
peculiarity of this sort of dwelling is the enormous size of the spiders.
To the left of the entrance door, on the boulevard side, at about
the height of a man from the ground, a small window which had been
walled up formed a square niche full of stones which the children
had thrown there as they passed by.
A portion of this building has recently been demolished.
From what still remains of it one can form a judgment as to what it
was in former days. As a whole, it was not over a hundred years old.
A hundred years is youth in a church and age in a house.
It seems as though man's lodging partook of his ephemeral character,
and God's house of his eternity.
The postmen called the house Number 50-52; but it was known
in the neighborhood as the Gorbeau house.
Let us explain whence this appellation was derived.
Collectors of petty details, who become herbalists of anecdotes,
and prick slippery dates into their memories with a pin,
know that there was in Paris, during the last century, about 1770,
two attorneys at the Chatelet named, one Corbeau (Raven), the other
Renard (Fox). The two names had been forestalled by La Fontaine.
The opportunity was too fine for the lawyers; they made the most of it.
A parody was immediately put in circulation in the galleries of the
court-house, in verses that limped a little:--
Maitre Corbeau, sur un dossier perche,[13]
Tenait dans son bee une saisie executoire;
Maitre Renard, par l'odeur alleche,
Lui fit a peu pres cette histoire:
He! bonjour. Etc.
[13] Lawyer Corbeau, perched on a docket, held in his beak a writ
of execution; Lawyer Renard, attracted by the smell, addressed him
nearly as follows, etc.
The two honest practitioners, embarrassed by the jests, and finding
the bearing of their heads interfered with by the shouts of laughter
which followed them, resolved to get rid of their names, and hit
upon the expedient of applying to the king.
Their petition was presented to Louis XV. on the same day when the
Papal Nuncio, on the one hand, and the Cardinal de la Roche-Aymon on
the other, both devoutly kneeling, were each engaged in putting on,
in his Majesty's presence, a slipper on the bare feet of Madame
du Barry, who had just got out of bed. The king, who was laughing,
continued to laugh, passed gayly from the two bishops to the two
lawyers, and bestowed on these limbs of the law their former names,
or nearly so. By the kings command, Maitre Corbeau was permitted
to add a tail to his initial letter and to call himself Gorbeau.
Maitre Renard was less lucky; all he obtained was leave to place a P
in front of his R, and to call himself Prenard; so that the second
name bore almost as much resemblance as the first.
Now, according to local tradition, this Maitre Gorbeau had been
the proprietor of the building numbered 50-52 on the Boulevard de
l'Hopital. He was even the author of the monumental window.
Hence the edifice bore the name of the Gorbeau house.
Opposite this house, among the trees of the boulevard, rose a great elm
which was three-quarters dead; almost directly facing it opens the Rue de
la Barriere des Gobelins, a street then without houses, unpaved, planted
with unhealthy trees, which was green or muddy according to the season,
and which ended squarely in the exterior wall of Paris. An odor
of copperas issued in puffs from the roofs of the neighboring factory.
The barrier was close at hand. In 1823 the city wall was still
in existence.
This barrier itself evoked gloomy fancies in the mind. It was
the road to Bicetre. It was through it that, under the Empire
and the Restoration, prisoners condemned to death re-entered Paris
on the day of their execution. It was there, that, about 1829,
was committed that mysterious assassination, called "The assassination
of the Fontainebleau barrier," whose authors justice was never able
to discover; a melancholy problem which has never been elucidated,
a frightful enigma which has never been unriddled. Take a few steps,
and you come upon that fatal Rue Croulebarbe, where Ulbach stabbed
the goat-girl of Ivry to the sound of thunder, as in the melodramas.
A few paces more, and you arrive at the abominable pollarded elms
of the Barriere Saint-Jacques, that expedient of the philanthropist
to conceal the scaffold, that miserable and shameful Place de Grove
of a shop-keeping and bourgeois society, which recoiled before
the death penalty, neither daring to abolish it with grandeur,
nor to uphold it with authority.
Leaving aside this Place Saint-Jacques, which was, as it were,
predestined, and which has always been horrible, probably the
most mournful spot on that mournful boulevard, seven and thirty
years ago, was the spot which even to-day is so unattractive,
where stood the building Number 50-52.
Bourgeois houses only began to spring up there twenty-five years later.
The place was unpleasant. In addition to the gloomy thoughts which
assailed one there, one was conscious of being between the Salpetriere,
a glimpse of whose dome could be seen, and Bicetre, whose outskirts
one was fairly touching; that is to say, between the madness of women
and the madness of men. As far as the eye could see, one could
perceive nothing but the abattoirs, the city wall, and the fronts of
a few factories, resembling barracks or monasteries; everywhere about
stood hovels, rubbish, ancient walls blackened like cerecloths,
new white walls like winding-sheets; everywhere parallel rows of trees,
buildings erected on a line, flat constructions, long, cold rows,
and the melancholy sadness of right angles. Not an unevenness
of the ground, not a caprice in the architecture, not a fold.
The ensemble was glacial, regular, hideous. Nothing oppresses
the heart like symmetry. It is because symmetry is ennui,
and ennui is at the very foundation of grief. Despair yawns.
Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers may be imagined,
and that is a hell where one is bored. If such a hell existed,
that bit of the Boulevard de l'Hopital might have formed the entrance
to it.
Nevertheless, at nightfall, at the moment when the daylight
is vanishing, especially in winter, at the hour when the twilight
breeze tears from the elms their last russet leaves, when the
darkness is deep and starless, or when the moon and the wind are
making openings in the clouds and losing themselves in the shadows,
this boulevard suddenly becomes frightful. The black lines sink
inwards and are lost in the shades, like morsels of the infinite.
The passer-by cannot refrain from recalling the innumerable
traditions of the place which are connected with the gibbet.
The solitude of this spot, where so many crimes have been committed,
had something terrible about it. One almost had a presentiment
of meeting with traps in that darkness; all the confused forms
of the darkness seemed suspicious, and the long, hollow square,
of which one caught a glimpse between each tree, seemed graves:
by day it was ugly; in the evening melancholy; by night it
was sinister.
In summer, at twilight, one saw, here and there, a few old women
seated at the foot of the elm, on benches mouldy with rain.
These good old women were fond of begging.
However, this quarter, which had a superannuated rather than an
antique air, was tending even then to transformation. Even at
that time any one who was desirous of seeing it had to make haste.
Each day some detail of the whole effect was disappearing.
For the last twenty years the station of the Orleans railway
has stood beside the old faubourg and distracted it, as it does
to-day. Wherever it is placed on the borders of a capital,
a railway station is the death of a suburb and the birth of a city.
It seems as though, around these great centres of the movements
of a people, the earth, full of germs, trembled and yawned, to engulf
the ancient dwellings of men and to allow new ones to spring forth,
at the rattle of these powerful machines, at the breath of these
monstrous horses of civilization which devour coal and vomit fire.
The old houses crumble and new ones rise.
Since the Orleans railway has invaded the region of the Salpetriere,
the ancient, narrow streets which adjoin the moats Saint-Victor
and the Jardin des Plantes tremble, as they are violently traversed
three or four times each day by those currents of coach fiacres
and omnibuses which, in a given time, crowd back the houses
to the right and the left; for there are things which are odd
when said that are rigorously exact; and just as it is true to say
that in large cities the sun makes the southern fronts of houses
to vegetate and grow, it is certain that the frequent passage of
vehicles enlarges streets. The symptoms of a new life are evident.
In this old provincial quarter, in the wildest nooks, the pavement
shows itself, the sidewalks begin to crawl and to grow longer,
even where there are as yet no pedestrians. One morning,--a memorable
morning in July, 1845,--black pots of bitumen were seen smoking there;
on that day it might be said that civilization had arrived in the Rue
de l'Ourcine, and that Paris had entered the suburb of Saint-Marceau. _
Read next: VOLUME II - COSETTE: BOOK FOURTH - THE GORBEAU HOVEL: CHAPTER II. A Nest for Owl and a Warbler
Read previous: VOLUME II - COSETTE: BOOK THIRD - ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE PROMISE MADE TO THE DEAD WOMAN: CHAPTER XI. Number 9,430 reappears, and Cosette wins it in the Lottery
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