Ferragus | Page 6

gracefully noble
thoughts which come to an impressible mind in the middle of the rue
Royale, and it certainly lacks the majesty which reigns in the Place
Vendome.
If you walk the streets of the Ile Saint-Louis, do not seek the reason of
the nervous sadness that lays hold upon you save in the solitude of the
spot, the gloomy look of the houses, and the great deserted mansions.
This island, the ghost of /fermiers-generaux/, is the Venice of Paris.
The Place de la Bourse is voluble, busy, degraded; it is never fine
except by moonlight at two in the morning. By day it is Paris
epitomized; by night it is a dream of Greece. The rue
Traversiere-Saint-Honore--is not that a villainous street? Look at the
wretched little houses with two windows on a floor, where vice, crime,
and misery abound. The narrow streets exposed to the north, where the
sun never comes more than three or four times a year, are the cut-throat
streets which murder with impunity; the authorities of the present day
do not meddle with them; but in former times the Parliament might

perhaps have summoned the lieutenant of police and reprimanded him
for the state of things; and it would, at least, have issued some decree
against such streets, as it once did against the wigs of the

Chapter of
Beauvais. And yet Monsieur Benoiston de Chateauneuf has proved that
the mortality of these streets is double that of others! To sum up such
theories by a single example: is not the rue Fromentin both murderous
and profligate!
These observations, incomprehensible out of Paris, will doubtless be
understood by musing men of thought and poesy and pleasure, who
know, while rambling about Paris, how to harvest the mass of floating
interests which may be gathered at all hours within her walls; to them
Paris is the most delightful and varied of monsters: here, a pretty
woman; farther on, a haggard pauper; here, new as the coinage of a new
reign; there, in this corner, elegant as a fashionable woman. A monster,
moreover, complete! Its garrets, as it were, a head full of knowledge
and genius; its first storeys stomachs repleted; its shops, actual feet,
where the busy ambulating crowds are moving. Ah! what an
ever-active life the monster leads! Hardly has the last vibration of the
last carriage coming from a ball ceased at its heart before its arms are
moving at the barriers and it shakes itself slowly into motion. Doors
open; turning on their hinges like the membrane of some huge lobster,
invisibly manipulated by thirty thousand men or women, of whom each
individual occupies a space of six square feet, but has a kitchen, a
workshop, a bed, children, a garden, little light to see by, but must see
all. Imperceptibly, the articulations begin to crack; motion
communicates itself; the street speaks. By mid-day, all is alive; the
chimneys smoke, the monster eats; then he roars, and his thousand
paws begin to ramp. Splendid spectacle! But, O Paris! he who has not
admired your gloomy passages, your gleams and flashes of light, your
deep and silent /cul-de-sacs/, who has not listened to your murmurings
between midnight and two in the morning, knows nothing as yet of
your true poesy, nor of your broad and fantastic contrasts.

There are a few amateurs who never go their way heedlessly; who
savor their Paris, so to speak; who know its physiognomy so well that
they see every wart, and pimple, and redness. To others, Paris is always
that monstrous marvel, that amazing assemblage of activities, of
schemes, of thoughts; the city of a hundred thousand tales, the head of
the universe. But to those few, Paris is sad or gay, ugly or beautiful,
living or dead; to them Paris is a creature; every man, every fraction of
a house is a lobe of the cellular tissue of that great courtesan whose
head and heart and fantastic customs they know so well. These men are
lovers of Paris; they lift their noses at such or such a corner of a street,
certain that they can see the face of a clock; they tell a friend whose
tobacco-pouch is empty, "Go down that passage and turn to the left;
there's a tobacconist next door to a confectioner, where there's a pretty
girl." Rambling about Paris is, to these poets, a costly luxury. How can
they help spending precious minutes before the dramas, disasters, faces,
and picturesque events which meet us everywhere amid this heaving
queen of cities, clothed in posters,--who has, nevertheless, not a single
clean corner, so complying is she to the vices of the French nation!
Who has not chanced to leave his home early in the morning, intending
to go to some extremity of Paris,