________________________________________________
_ The Parisians who nowadays on entering on the Rue Rambuteau at the end
near the Halles, notice on their right, opposite the Rue Mondetour,
a basket-maker's shop having for its sign a basket in the form
of Napoleon the Great with this inscription:--
NAPOLEON IS MADE
WHOLLY OF WILLOW,
have no suspicion of the terrible scenes which this very spot
witnessed hardly thirty years ago.
It was there that lay the Rue de la Chanvrerie, which ancient deeds
spell Chanverrerie, and the celebrated public-house called Corinthe.
The reader will remember all that has been said about the
barricade effected at this point, and eclipsed, by the way,
by the barricade Saint-Merry. It was on this famous barricade
of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, now fallen into profound obscurity,
that we are about to shed a little light.
May we be permitted to recur, for the sake of clearness in the recital,
to the simple means which we have already employed in the case
of Waterloo. Persons who wish to picture to themselves in a
tolerably exact manner the constitution of the houses which stood
at that epoch near the Pointe Saint-Eustache, at the northeast
angle of the Halles of Paris, where to-day lies the embouchure
of the Rue Rambuteau, have only to imagine an N touching the Rue
Saint-Denis with its summit and the Halles with its base, and whose
two vertical bars should form the Rue de la Grande-Truanderie,
and the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and whose transverse bar should be
formed by the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie. The old Rue Mondetour
cut the three strokes of the N at the most crooked angles.
So that the labyrinthine confusion of these four streets sufficed
to form, on a space three fathoms square, between the Halles and
the Rue Saint-Denis on the one hand, and between the Rue du Cygne
and the Rue des Precheurs on the other, seven islands of houses,
oddly cut up, of varying sizes, placed crosswise and hap-hazard, and
barely separated, like the blocks of stone in a dock, by narrow crannies.
We say narrow crannies, and we can give no more just idea of those dark,
contracted, many-angled alleys, lined with eight-story buildings.
These buildings were so decrepit that, in the Rue de la Chanvrerie
and the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie, the fronts were shored up
with beams running from one house to another. The street was narrow
and the gutter broad, the pedestrian there walked on a pavement
that was always wet, skirting little stalls resembling cellars,
big posts encircled with iron hoops, excessive heaps of refuse,
and gates armed with enormous, century-old gratings. The Rue
Rambuteau has devastated all that.
The name of Mondetour paints marvellously well the sinuosities of
that whole set of streets. A little further on, they are found still
better expressed by the Rue Pirouette, which ran into the Rue Mondetour.
The passer-by who got entangled from the Rue Saint-Denis in the Rue
de la Chanvrerie beheld it gradually close in before him as though
he had entered an elongated funnel. At the end of this street,
which was very short, he found further passage barred in the direction
of the Halles by a tall row of houses, and he would have thought
himself in a blind alley, had he not perceived on the right and left
two dark cuts through which he could make his escape. This was
the Rue Mondetour, which on one side ran into the Rue de Precheurs,
and on the other into the Rue du Cygne and the Petite-Truanderie. At
the bottom of this sort of cul-de-sac, at the angle of the cutting
on the right, there was to be seen a house which was not so tall
as the rest, and which formed a sort of cape in the street.
It is in this house, of two stories only, that an illustrious
wine-shop had been merrily installed three hundred years before.
This tavern created a joyous noise in the very spot which old
Theophilus described in the following couplet:--
La branle le squelette horrible
D'un pauvre amant qui se pendit.[47]
[47] There swings the horrible skeleton of a poor lover who hung himself.
The situation was good, and tavern-keepers succeeded each other there,
from father to son.
In the time of Mathurin Regnier, this cabaret was called the
Pot-aux-Roses, and as the rebus was then in fashion, it had for its
sign-board, a post (poteau) painted rose-color. In the last century,
the worthy Natoire, one of the fantastic masters nowadays despised
by the stiff school, having got drunk many times in this wine-shop
at the very table where Regnier had drunk his fill, had painted,
by way of gratitude, a bunch of Corinth grapes on the pink post.
The keeper of the cabaret, in his joy, had changed his device and had
caused to be placed in gilt letters beneath the bunch these words:
"At the Bunch of Corinth Grapes" ("Au Raisin de Corinthe"). Hence the name
of Corinthe. Nothing is more natural to drunken men than ellipses.
The ellipsis is the zig-zag of the phrase. Corinthe gradually
dethroned the Pot-aux-Roses. The last proprietor of the dynasty,
Father Hucheloup, no longer acquainted even with the tradition,
had the post painted blue.
A room on the ground floor, where the bar was situated, one on the
first floor containing a billiard-table, a wooden spiral staircase
piercing the ceiling, wine on the tables, smoke on the walls,
candles in broad daylight,--this was the style of this cabaret.
A staircase with a trap-door in the lower room led to the cellar.
On the second floor were the lodgings of the Hucheloup family.
They were reached by a staircase which was a ladder rather than
a staircase, and had for their entrance only a private door in the
large room on the first floor. Under the roof, in two mansard attics,
were the nests for the servants. The kitchen shared the ground-floor
with the tap-room.
Father Hucheloup had, possibly, been born a chemist, but the fact
is that he was a cook; people did not confine themselves to drinking
alone in his wine-shop, they also ate there. Hucheloup had invented
a capital thing which could be eaten nowhere but in his house,
stuffed carps, which he called carpes au gras. These were eaten by
the light of a tallow candle or of a lamp of the time of Louis XVI.,
on tables to which were nailed waxed cloths in lieu of table-cloths.
People came thither from a distance. Hucheloup, one fine morning,
had seen fit to notify passers-by of this "specialty"; he had dipped
a brush in a pot of black paint, and as he was an orthographer
on his own account, as well as a cook after his own fashion,
he had improvised on his wall this remarkable inscription:--
CARPES HO GRAS.
One winter, the rain-storms and the showers had taken a fancy
to obliterate the S which terminated the first word, and the G
which began the third; this is what remained:--
CARPE HO RAS.
Time and rain assisting, a humble gastronomical announcement had
become a profound piece of advice.
In this way it came about, that though he knew no French, Father Hucheloup
understood Latin, that he had evoked philosophy from his kitchen,
and that, desirous simply of effacing Lent, he had equalled Horace.
And the striking thing about it was, that that also meant:
"Enter my wine-shop."
Nothing of all this is in existence now. The Mondetour labyrinth
was disembowelled and widely opened in 1847, and probably no longer
exists at the present moment. The Rue de la Chanvrerie and Corinthe
have disappeared beneath the pavement of the Rue Rambuteau.
As we have already said, Corinthe was the meeting-place if not the
rallying-point, of Courfeyrac and his friends. It was Grantaire
who had discovered Corinthe. He had entered it on account of the
Carpe horas, and had returned thither on account of the Carpes
au gras. There they drank, there they ate, there they shouted;
they did not pay much, they paid badly, they did not pay at all,
but they were always welcome. Father Hucheloup was a jovial host.
Hucheloup, that amiable man, as was just said, was a wine-shop-keeper
with a mustache; an amusing variety. He always had an ill-tempered air,
seemed to wish to intimidate his customers, grumbled at the people
who entered his establishment, and had rather the mien of seeking
a quarrel with them than of serving them with soup. And yet,
we insist upon the word, people were always welcome there. This oddity
had attracted customers to his shop, and brought him young men,
who said to each other: "Come hear Father Hucheloup growl." He had
been a fencing-master. All of a sudden, he would burst out laughing.
A big voice, a good fellow. He had a comic foundation under
a tragic exterior, he asked nothing better than to frighten you,
very much like those snuff-boxes which are in the shape of a pistol.
The detonation makes one sneeze.
Mother Hucheloup, his wife, was a bearded and a very homely creature.
About 1830, Father Hucheloup died. With him disappeared the secret
of stuffed carps. His inconsolable widow continued to keep the
wine-shop. But the cooking deteriorated, and became execrable;
the wine, which had always been bad, became fearfully bad.
Nevertheless, Courfeyrac and his friends continued to go to Corinthe,--
out of pity, as Bossuet said.
The Widow Hucheloup was breathless and misshapen and given
to rustic recollections. She deprived them of their flatness
by her pronunciation. She had a way of her own of saying things,
which spiced her reminiscences of the village and of her springtime.
It had formerly been her delight, so she affirmed, to hear
the loups-de-gorge (rouges-gorges) chanter dans les ogrepines
(aubepines)--to hear the redbreasts sing in the hawthorn-trees.
The hall on the first floor, where "the restaurant" was situated,
was a large and long apartment encumbered with stools, chairs, benches,
and tables, and with a crippled, lame, old billiard-table. It
was reached by a spiral staircase which terminated in the corner
of the room at a square hole like the hatchway of a ship.
This room, lighted by a single narrow window, and by a lamp that
was always burning, had the air of a garret. All the four-footed
furniture comported itself as though it had but three legs--
the whitewashed walls had for their only ornament the following
quatrain in honor of Mame Hucheloup:--
Elle etonne a dix pas, elle epouvente a deux,
Une verrue habite en son nez hasardeux;
On tremble a chaque instant qu'elle ne vous la mouche
Et qu'un beau jour son nez ne tombe dans sa bouche.[48]
[48] She astounds at ten paces, she frightens at two, a wart inhabits
her hazardous nose; you tremble every instant lest she should blow it
at you, and lest, some fine day, her nose should tumble into her mouth.
This was scrawled in charcoal on the wall.
Mame Hucheloup, a good likeness, went and came from morning till
night before this quatrain with the most perfect tranquillity.
Two serving-maids, named Matelote and Gibelotte,[49] and who had
never been known by any other names, helped Mame Hucheloup to set
on the tables the jugs of poor wine, and the various broths
which were served to the hungry patrons in earthenware bowls.
Matelote, large, plump, redhaired, and noisy, the favorite
ex-sultana of the defunct Hucheloup, was homelier than any
mythological monster, be it what it may; still, as it becomes the
servant to always keep in the rear of the mistress, she was less
homely than Mame Hucheloup. Gibelotte, tall, delicate, white with
a lymphatic pallor, with circles round her eyes, and drooping lids,
always languid and weary, afflicted with what may be called
chronic lassitude, the first up in the house and the last in bed,
waited on every one, even the other maid, silently and gently,
smiling through her fatigue with a vague and sleepy smile.
[49] Matelote: a culinary preparation of various fishes.
Gibelotte: stewed rabbits.
Before entering the restaurant room, the visitor read on the door
the following line written there in chalk by Courfeyrac:--
Regale si tu peux et mange si tu l'oses.[50]
[50] Treat if you can, and eat if you dare. _
Read next: VOLUME IV: BOOK TWELFTH - CORINTHE: CHAPTER II. Preliminary Gayeties
Read previous: VOLUME IV: BOOK ELEVENTH - THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE: CHAPTER VI. Recruits
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