CHAPTER I.
MASTER GORBEAU.
Forty years ago the solitary walker who ventured into the lostdistricts of the Salpêtrière, and went up the boulevard as far asthe Barrière d'Italie, reached a quarter where it might be said thatParis disappeared. It was not solitude, for there were passers-by; itwas not the country, for there were houses and streets; it was not atown, for the streets had ruts as large as those in the high-roads,and grass grew in them; and it was not a village, for the houses weretoo lofty. What was it then? It was an inhabited place where there wasnobody, a deserted spot where there was somebody; it was a boulevardof the great city, a street of Paris, more ferocious at night than aforest, more gloomy by day than a cemetery. It was the old quarterof the Marché-aux-Chevaux. The rambler, if he risked himself beyondthe tottering walls of the market, if he even consented to pass theRue du Petit-Banquier, reached the corner of the Rue des Vignes St.Marcel, a but little known latitude, after leaving on his right agarden protected by high walls; next a field in which stood tan-millsresembling gigantic beaver-dams; next an enclosure encumbered withplanks, tree-stumps, sawdust, and chips, on the top of which a largedog barked; then a long low wall, all in ruins, with a small, decrepitback gate, covered with moss, which burst into flower in spring; andlastly, in the most desolate spot, a hideous and decrepit building, onwhich could be read in large letters, "Stick no Bills." Here, close toa foundry, and between two garden walls, could be seen, at the timeof which we write, a poor house, which, at the first glance, seemedsmall as a cottage, but was in reality large as a cathedral. It turnedits gable end to the public thoroughfare, and hence came its apparentsmallness; nearly the whole house was concealed, and only a door and awindow could be perceived.
This house was only one story high. On examining it, the first factthat struck you was that the door could never have been other thanthat of a low lodging-house, while the window, had it been carved instone instead of made of stucco, might have belonged to a mansion.The door was nothing but a collection of worm-eaten planks, clumsilyheld together by roughly-planed cross-beams. It opened immediatelyon a steep staircase, muddy, dirty, and dusty, of the same widthas itself, which could be seen from the street mounting steep as aladder, and disappearing in the gloom between two walls. The top ofthe clumsy opening in which the door stood was masked by a thin dealplank, in which a triangular hole had been cut. On the inside of thedoor a brush dipped in ink had clumsily traced No. 52, while overthe skylight the same brush had painted No. 50; so people hesitated.Dust-colored rags hung like a drapery over the triangular skylight.The window was wide, tolerably lofty, filled with large panes ofglass, and protected by Venetian shutters; but these panes had variouswounds, at once concealed and betrayed by an ingenious bandage ofpaper, and the Venetian shutters, broken and hanging from their hinges,threatened passers-by more than they protected the inhabitants. Thehorizontal screen-boards were wanting here and there, and these placeshad been filled up with boards nailed on perpendicularly; so thatthe affair began by being a Venetian screen, and ended by being ashutter. This door, which had an unclean look, and this window, whichlooked honest, though fallen in the world, produced the effect of twobeggars walking side by side with two different faces under the samerags, the one having always been a mendicant, while the other had oncebeen a gentleman. The staircase led to a very large building, whichresembled a shed which had been converted into a house. This buildinghad, as its intestinal tube, a long passage, upon which opened, rightand left, compartments of various dimensions, habitable at a pinch,and more like booths than cells. These rooms looked out on the drearylandscape around. The whole was dark, wearisome, dull, melancholy, andsepulchral, and traversed, according as the cracks were in the roofor the door, by cold sunbeams or sharp draughts. An interesting andpicturesque peculiarity of houses of this description is the enormoussize of the cobwebs. To the left of the door, on the boulevard, and atabout six feet from the ground, a bricked-up window formed a squarehole filled by passing lads with stones. A portion of this building hasbeen recently demolished, but what still remains will allow an idea tobe formed of what it was. The whole affair is not more than a centuryold; one hundred years are the youth of a church and the old age of ahuman abode. It seems as if the house of man shares his brief tenure,and the House of God His eternity. The postman called this house No.50-52, but it was known in the quarter by the name of Maison Gorbeau.Let us state whence this title came.
The collectors of things not generally known, who make anecdotalherbals, and prick fugacious dates into their memory with a pin, knowthat there were in Paris, about the year 1770, two advocates at theChâtelet of the names of Corbeau and Renard,--two names foreseen byLafontaine. The opportunity was too good to be neglected, and ere longthe following parody, in rather halting verse, was in everybody'smouth:--
"Maître Corbeau, sur un dossier perché, Tenait dans son bec une saisie exécutoire; Maître Renard, par l'odeur alléché, Lui fit à peu près cette histoire: Eh, bonjour," etc.
The two honest lawyers, who were unable to hold their heads up underthe outbursts of laughter that followed them, resolved to get rid oftheir names, and for that purpose appealed to the king. The petitionwas handed to Louis XV. on the very day when the Papal Nuncio kneelingon one side, and Cardinal de la Roche Aymon on the other, were drawingthe slippers on to the bare feet of Madame du Barry, who had justleft her couch. The king, who was laughing, continued to laugh, gaylypassed from the two bishops to the two lawyers, and forgave them theirnames, or nearly so. By royal authority Master Corbeau was allowedto add a tail to his initial letter and become Gorbeau; but MasterRenard was less fortunate,--he could only obtain leave to place a Pbefore his R, and call himself Prenard, so that the second name wasnearly as significant as the first. Now, according to local tradition,Master Gorbeau had been owner of the building numbered 50-52, on theBoulevard de l'Hôpital, and was even author of the grand window. Fromthis has this tumble-down place the name of Maison Gorbeau. Oppositethe house there stands, amid the boulevard trees, an elm which isnearly three parts dead; a little farther on is the Rue de la Barrièredes Gobelins,--a street at that time without houses, unpaved, plantedwith badly-growing trees, and which ran straight down to the citywalls. A copperas smell issues in puffs from the roof of an adjacentmanufactory. The barrier was close by, and in 1823 the city walls werestill in existence. The barrier itself cast a gloom over the mind, forit was on the road to Bicêtre. Under the Empire and the Restoration mencondemned to death returned to Paris through it on the day of theirexecution. Here was committed, about the year 1829, that mysteriousassassination called "the murder of the Barrière de Fontainebleau,"--afrightful problem which has never been elucidated, a mournful enigmawhich has never been solved. A few steps farther on you come to thefatal Rue Croulebarbe, in which Ulbach stabbed the woman who lookedafter the Ivry goats, to the sound of thunder, as in a melodrama. A fewmore steps and you reach the abominable pollard-elms of the BarrièreSt. Jacques, that philanthropic expedient concealing the scaffold,the paltry, disgraceful Place de Grève of a shop-keeping society,which has recoiled before the penalty of death, though not daring toabolish it with grandeur or keep it up with authority. Thirty-sevenyears ago, and leaving aside this place St. Jacques, which was, asit were, predestined, and has always been horrible, the gloomiestpoint perhaps of all this gloomy boulevard was that where No. 50-52stood. Tradespeople did not begin to brood there till five-and-twentyyears later. The place was morose, for you felt yourself between LaSalpêtrière, whose dome was just visible, and Bicêtre, whose barrieryou could touch; that is to say, between male and female mania. As faras the eye could reach, nothing was visible save the slaughter-houses,the city wall, and a few rare frontages of foundries, resemblingbarracks or monasteries. Everywhere were sheds and rubbish, old wallsblack as coffins, new walls white as winding-sheets; everywhereparallel rows of trees, buildings standing in rows, long odd lines, andthe gloomy sadness of right angles. There was not
a diversity of thesoil, not a single architectural whim; the _ensemble_ was freezing,regular, and hideous. Nothing makes the heart so heavy as symmetry,because symmetry is ennui, and ennui is the basis of mourning, ayawning despair. It is possible to imagine something more horrible thanan Inferno in which people suffer; it is one in which they are ennuyés.If such an Inferno existed, this section of the Boulevard de l'Hôpitalmight be its avenue.
At nightfall, at the moment when light disappears, and before all inwinter, at the hour when the evening breeze is tearing from the elmstheir last rusty leaves, when the darkness is profound and starless,and when the moon and the wind make rents in the clouds, this boulevardbecame really terrifying. The black outlines were lost in the gloom,and the passer-by could not refrain from thinking of the countlessgallows traditions of the spot. This solitude, in which so many crimeshad been committed, had something awful about it; traps could almostbe foreseen in the darkness, all the confused shapes of the darknessappeared suspicious, and the long, hollow squares noticed between thetrees seemed graves. By day it was ugly, in the evening lugubrious,and at night sinister. In the summer twilight a few old women mightbe seen sitting under the elms upon raw, rotted benches; these worthyold ladies had a partiality for begging. Even at the time of which wewrite, however, this quarter, which looked more superannuated thanancient, was striving to transform itself, and any one who wished tosee it was obliged to make haste, for each day some detail disappearedfrom the _ensemble._ For the last twenty years the Orleans railwaystation has been by the side of the old faubourg, and has worked itup; for wherever a station is built on the skirt of a capital it isthe death of a suburb and the birth of a town. Round these centres ofpopular movement, at the rolling of these mighty machines, under thebreath of these monstrous horses of civilization which devour coal andsnort fire, the earth trembles, and opens to swallow up the old abodesof men and bring forth new ones; the old houses crumble away, and newones rise in their place.
From the day when the Orleans railway station invaded the territoryof the Salpêtrière, the old narrow streets that border the Jardin desPlantes have been shaken down, traversed as they are three or fourtimes a day by those currents of diligences, hackney coaches, andomnibuses, which, within a given time, drive back the houses on bothsides: for it is a curious though perfectly true fact that, just asin large capitals the sun makes the fronts of houses grow and expandto the south, the frequent passing of vehicles widens streets. Thesymptoms of a new life are visible in the remotest corners of thisold provincial district; pavement is being laid down and is beginningto extend to spots where there are as yet no wayfarers. One memorablemorning in July, 1845, the bitumen caldrons were suddenly seen smokingthere, and on that day it may be said that civilization reached the Ruede l'Oursine, and that Paris entered the Faubourg St. Marceau.