CHAPTER I--MASTER GORBEAU

  Forty years ago, a rambler who had ventured into that unknown country ofthe Salpêtrière, and who had mounted to the Barrière d'Italie by wayof the boulevard, reached a point where it might be said that Parisdisappeared. It was no longer solitude, for there were passers-by; itwas not the country, for there were houses and streets; it was not thecity, for the streets had ruts like highways, and the grass grew inthem; 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 desertplace where there was some one; it was a boulevard of the great city, astreet of Paris; more wild at night than the forest, more gloomy by daythan a cemetery.

  It was the old quarter of the Marché-aux-Chevaux.

  The rambler, if he risked himself outside the four decrepit walls ofthis Marché-aux-Chevaux; if he consented even to pass beyond the Rue duPetit-Banquier, after leaving on his right a garden protected by highwalls; then a field in which tan-bark mills rose like gigantic beaverhuts; 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 whichran the inscription in large letters: POST NO BILLS,--this daringrambler would have reached little known latitudes at the corner of theRue des Vignes-Saint-Marcel. There, near a factory, and between twogarden walls, there could be seen, at that epoch, a mean building,which, at the first glance, seemed as small as a thatched hovel, andwhich was, in reality, as large as a cathedral. It presented its sideand gable to the public road; hence its apparent diminutiveness. Nearlythe whole of the house was hidden. Only the door and one window could beseen.

  This hovel was only one story high.

  The first detail that struck the observer was, that the door could neverhave been anything but the door of a hovel, while the window, if ithad 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 boundtogether by cross-beams which resembled roughly hewn logs. Itopened directly on a steep staircase of lofty steps, muddy, chalky,plaster-stained, dusty steps, of the same width as itself, whichcould be seen from the street, running straight up like a ladder anddisappearing in the darkness between two walls. The top of the shapelessbay into which this door shut was masked by a narrow scantling in thecentre of which a triangular hole had been sawed, which served both aswicket and air-hole when the door was closed. On the inside of thedoor the figures 52 had been traced with a couple of strokes of a brushdipped in ink, and above the scantling the same hand had daubed thenumber 50, so that one hesitated. Where was one? Above the door it said,"Number 50"; the inside replied, "no, Number 52." No one knows whatdust-colored figures were suspended like draperies from the triangularopening.

  The window was large, sufficiently elevated, garnished with Venetianblinds, and with a frame in large square panes; only these large paneswere suffering from various wounds, which were both concealed andbetrayed by an ingenious paper bandage. And the blinds, dislocated andunpasted, threatened passers-by rather than screened the occupants.The horizontal slats were missing here and there and had been naïvelyreplaced with boards nailed on perpendicularly; so that what began asa blind ended as a shutter. This door with an unclean, and this windowwith 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 amendicant, and the other having once been a gentleman.

  The staircase led to a very vast edifice which resembled a shed whichhad been converted into a house. This edifice had, for its intestinaltube, a long corridor, on which opened to right and left sorts ofcompartments of varied dimensions which were inhabitable under stressof circumstances, and rather more like stalls than cells. These chambersreceived their light from the vague waste grounds in the neighborhood.

  All this was dark, disagreeable, wan, melancholy, sepulchral; traversedaccording as the crevices lay in the roof or in the door, by cold raysor by icy winds. An interesting and picturesque peculiarity of this sortof dwelling is the enormous size of the spiders.

  To the left of the entrance door, on the boulevard side, at about theheight of a man from the ground, a small window which had been walled upformed a square niche full of stones which the children had thrown thereas they passed by.

  A portion of this building has recently been demolished. From what stillremains 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 isyouth in a church and age in a house. It seems as though man's lodgingpartook of his ephemeral character, and God's house of his eternity.

  The postmen called the house Number 50-52; but it was known in theneighborhood as the Gorbeau house.

  Let us explain whence this appellation was derived.

  Collectors of petty details, who become herbalists of anecdotes, andprick slippery dates into their memories with a pin, know that therewas in Paris, during the last century, about 1770, two attorneys at theChâtelet named, one Corbeau (Raven), the other Renard (Fox). The twonames had been forestalled by La Fontaine. The opportunity was too finefor the lawyers; they made the most of it. A parody was immediatelyput in circulation in the galleries of the court-house, in verses thatlimped a little:--