At the Sign of the Cat Racket | Page 3

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Etext prepared by Dagny, [email protected] and John Bickers,
[email protected]

At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
by Honore de Balzac

Translated by Clara Bell

DEDICATION
To Mademoiselle Marie de Montheau

AT THE SIGN OF THE CAT AND RACKET

Half-way down the Rue Saint-Denis, almost at the corner of the Rue du
Petit-Lion, there stood formerly one of those delightful houses which
enable historians to reconstruct old Paris by analogy. The threatening
walls of this tumbledown abode seemed to have been decorated with
hieroglyphics. For what other name could the passer-by give to the Xs
and Vs which the horizontal or diagonal timbers traced on the front,
outlined by little parallel cracks in the plaster? It was evident that every
beam quivered in its mortices at the passing of the lightest vehicle. This
venerable structure was crowned by a triangular roof of which no
example will, ere long, be seen in Paris. This covering, warped by the
extremes of the Paris climate, projected three feet over the roadway, as
much to protect the threshold from the rainfall as to shelter the wall of a
loft and its sill-less dormer-window. This upper story was built of
planks, overlapping each other like slates, in order, no doubt, not to
overweight the frail house.
One rainy morning in the month of March, a young man, carefully

wrapped in his cloak, stood under the awning of a shop opposite this
old house, which he was studying with the enthusiasm of an antiquary.
In point of fact, this relic of the civic life of the sixteenth century
offered more than one problem to the consideration of an observer.
Each story presented some singularity; on the first floor four tall,
narrow windows, close together, were filled as to the lower panes with
boards, so as to produce the doubtful light by which a clever salesman
can ascribe to his goods the color his customers inquire for. The young
man seemed very scornful of this part of the house; his eyes had not yet
rested on it. The windows of the second floor, where the Venetian
blinds were drawn up, revealing little dingy muslin curtains behind the
large Bohemian glass panes, did not interest him either. His attention
was attracted to the third floor, to the modest sash-frames of wood, so
clumsily wrought that they might have found a place in the Museum of
Arts and Crafts to illustrate the early efforts of French carpentry. These
windows were glazed with small squares of glass so green that, but for
his good eyes, the young man could not have seen the blue-checked
cotton curtains which screened the mysteries of the room from profane
eyes. Now and then the watcher, weary of his fruitless contemplation,
or of the silence in which the house was buried, like the whole
neighborhood, dropped his eyes towards