Bab Bab 278 · 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 Mondétour, 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 Mondétour 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 Prêcheurs 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 Mondétour 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 Mondétour.

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 Mondétour, which on

one side ran into the Rue de Prêcheurs, 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:—

Là branle le squelette horrible

D’un pauvre amant qui se pendit.47

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 Mondétour 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 moustache; 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_ (_aubépines_)—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 étonne à dix pas, elle épouvente à deux,

Une verrue habite en son nez hasardeux;

On tremble à chaque instant qu’elle ne vous la mouche

Et qu’un beau jour son nez ne tombe dans sa bouche.48

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.

Before entering the restaurant room, the visitor read on the door the

following line written there in chalk by Courfeyrac:—

Régale si tu peux et mange si tu l’oses.50