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 thebearing of their heads interfered with by the shouts of laughter whichfollowed them, resolved to get rid of their names, and hit upon theexpedient of applying to the king.

  Their petition was presented to Louis XV. on the same day when thePapal Nuncio, on the one hand, and the Cardinal de la Roche-Aymon on theother, both devoutly kneeling, were each engaged in putting on, in hisMajesty's presence, a slipper on the bare feet of Madame du Barry, whohad 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 onthese limbs of the law their former names, or nearly so. By the kingscommand, Maître Corbeau was permitted to add a tail to his initialletter and to call himself Gorbeau. Maître Renard was less lucky; all heobtained was leave to place a P in front of his R, and to call himselfPrenard; so that the second name bore almost as much resemblance as thefirst.

  Now, according to local tradition, this Maître Gorbeau had been theproprietor 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 elmwhich was three-quarters dead; almost directly facing it opens the Ruede la Barrière des Gobelins, a street then without houses, unpaved,planted with unhealthy trees, which was green or muddy according to theseason, and which ended squarely in the exterior wall of Paris. An odorof copperas issued in puffs from the roofs of the neighboring factory.

  The barrier was close at hand. In 1823 the city wall was still inexistence.

  This barrier itself evoked gloomy fancies in the mind. It was theroad to Bicêtre. It was through it that, under the Empire and theRestoration, prisoners condemned to death re-entered Paris on the dayof their execution. It was there, that, about 1829, was committed thatmysterious assassination, called "The assassination of the Fontainebleaubarrier," whose authors justice was never able to discover; a melancholyproblem which has never been elucidated, a frightful enigma which hasnever been unriddled. Take a few steps, and you come upon that fatal RueCroulebarbe, where Ulbach stabbed the goat-girl of Ivry to the sound ofthunder, as in the melodramas. A few paces more, and you arrive at theabominable pollarded elms of the Barrière Saint-Jacques, that expedientof the philanthropist to conceal the scaffold, that miserable andshameful Place de Grève of a shop-keeping and bourgeois society, whichrecoiled before the death penalty, neither daring to abolish it withgrandeur, 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 mostmournful spot on that mournful boulevard, seven and thirty years ago,was the spot which even to-day is so unattractive, where stood thebuilding 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 whichassailed one there, one was conscious of being between the Salpêtrière,a glimpse of whose dome could be seen, and Bicêtre, whose outskirts onewas fairly touching; that is to say, between the madness of women andthe madness of men. As far as the eye could see, one could perceivenothing but the abattoirs, the city wall, and the fronts of a fewfactories, resembling barracks or monasteries; everywhere about stoodhovels, rubbish, ancient walls blackened like cerecloths, new whitewalls like winding-sheets; everywhere parallel rows of trees, buildingserected on a line, flat constructions, long, cold rows, and themelancholy sadness of right angles. Not an unevenness of the ground, nota caprice in the architecture, not a fold. The _ensemble_ was glacial,regular, hideous. Nothing oppresses the heart like symmetry. It isbecause symmetry is ennui, and ennui is at the very foundation of grief.Despair yawns. Something more terrible than a hell where one suffersmay be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored. If such a hellexisted, that bit of the Boulevard de l'Hôpital might have formed theentrance to it.

  Nevertheless, at nightfall, at the moment when the daylight isvanishing, especially in winter, at the hour when the twilight breezetears from the elms their last russet leaves, when the darkness is deepand starless, or when the moon and the wind are making openings in theclouds and losing themselves in the shadows, this boulevard suddenlybecomes frightful. The black lines sink inwards and are lost in theshades, like morsels of the infinite. The passer-by cannot refrain fromrecalling the innumerable traditions of the place which are connectedwith the gibbet. The solitude of this spot, where so many crimes havebeen committed, had something terrible about it. One almost had apresentiment of meeting with traps in that darkness; all the confusedforms of the darkness seemed suspicious, and the long, hollow square, ofwhich one caught a glimpse between each tree, seemed graves: by day itwas ugly; in the evening melancholy; by night it was sinister.

  In summer, at twilight, one saw, here and there, a few old women seatedat the foot of the elm, on benches mouldy with rain. These good oldwomen were fond of begging.

  However, this quarter, which had a superannuated rather than an antiqueair, was tending even then to transformation. Even at that time any onewho was desirous of seeing it had to make haste. Each day some detail ofthe whole effect was disappearing. For the last twenty years the stationof the Orleans railway has stood beside the old faubourg and distractedit, as it does to-day. Wherever it is placed on the borders of acapital, a railway station is the death of a suburb and the birth of acity. It seems as though, around these great centres of the movements ofa people, the earth, full of germs, trembled and yawned, to engulf theancient dwellings of men and to allow new ones to spring forth, at therattle of these powerful machines, at the breath of these monstroushorses of civilization which devour coal and vomit fire. The old housescrumble 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 theJardin des Plantes tremble, as they are violently traversed three orfour times each day by those currents of coach fiacres and omnibuseswhich, 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 thesouthern fronts of houses to vegetate and grow, it is certain that thefrequent passage of vehicles enlarges streets. The symptoms of a newlife are evident. In this old provincial quarter, in the wildest nooks,the pavement shows itself, the sidewalks begin to crawl and to growlonger, even where there are as yet no pedestrians. One morning,--amemorable morning in July, 1845,--black pots of bitumen were seensmoking there; on that day it might be said that civilization hadarrived in the Rue de l'Ourcine, and that Paris had entered the suburbof Saint-Marceau.