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MASTER GORBEAU
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.
MASTER GORBEAU
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.
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