1.C.4.1. MASTER GORBEAU
FORTY years ago, a rambler who had ventured into that
unknown country of the Salpetriere, and who had mounted to
the Barriere 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 passersby; 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 Marche-aux-Chevaux.
The rambler, if he risked himself outside the four decrepit
walls of this Marche-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 naively 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 Chatelet 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:—
Maitre Corbeau, sur un dossier perche,
Tenait dans son bee une saisie executoire;
Maitre Renard, par l'odeur alleche,
Lui fit a peu pres cette histoire:
He! bonjour. Etc.
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, Maitre Corbeau was permitted
to add a tail to his initial letter and to call himself
Gorbeau. Maitre 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 Maitre Gorbeau had
been the proprietor of the building numbered 50-52 on the
Boulevard de l'Hopital. 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 Barriere 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 Bicetre. 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 Barriere Saint-Jacques, that expedient
of the philanthropist to conceal the scaffold, that miserable
and shameful Place de Grove 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 Salpetriere, a glimpse of whose dome could
be seen, and Bicetre, 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 cere-cloths,
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'Hopital 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 passerby 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 Salpetriere,
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.