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HISTORY OF CORINTHE FROM ITS FOUNDATION
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.
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