Chapter Chapter 105 · MASTER GORBEAU

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.