Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
CHAPTER I—MASTER GORBEAU
2359 words | Chapter 179
Forty years ago, a rambler who had ventured into that unknown country
of the Salpêtrière, and who had mounted to the Barrière 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 Marché-aux-Chevaux.
The rambler, if he risked himself outside the four decrepit walls of
this Marché-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 naïvely
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
Châtelet 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:—
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:
Hé! bonjour. Etc.13
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, Maître Corbeau was permitted to add a tail to his
initial letter and to call himself Gorbeau. Maître 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 Maître Gorbeau had been the
proprietor of the building numbered 50-52 on the Boulevard de
l’Hôpital. 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 Barrière 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 Bicêtre. 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
Barrière Saint-Jacques, that expedient of the philanthropist to conceal
the scaffold, that miserable and shameful Place de Grève 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 Salpêtrière,
a glimpse of whose dome could be seen, and Bicêtre, 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’Hôpital 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 Salpêtrière,
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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