Forty years ago, a rambler who has ventured into that unknown country of the Salpetriere, and who has mounted to the Barriere d'Italie by way of the boulevard, reaches a point where it might be said that Paris disappeared. It is no longer solitude, for there are passers-by. It is not the country, for there are houses and streets. It is not the city, for the streets have ruts like highways, and the grass grows in them. It is not a village, the houses are too lofty. It is an inhabited spot where there is no one, a desert place where there is some one, a boulevard of the great city, more wild at night than the forest, more gloomy by day than a cemetery. It is the old quarter of the Marche-aux-Chevaux. If the rambler consents to pass beyond the Rue du Petit-Banquier, past a garden with high walls, a field of tan-bark mills like gigantic beaver huts, an enclosure of timber and a large dog barking, a long dilapidated wall with a little black door in mourning, he reaches, in the most deserted spot, a frightful and decrepit building. Nearly the whole of the house is hidden. Only the door and one window can be seen. This hovel is only one story high, and seems as small as a thatched hut, and is in reality as large as a cathedral.
The door could never have been anything but the door of a hovel: worm-eaten planks, a steep staircase like a ladder disappearing in the darkness, a triangular hole that serves as wicket and air-hole. On the inside of the door the figures 52 have been traced with a couple of strokes of a brush dipped in ink, and above the scantling the same hand has daubed the number 50, so that one hesitates. Where was one? Above the door it said, Number 50. The inside replied, no, Number 52. The window is large, garnished with Venetian blinds and large square panes suffering from various wounds, which are both concealed and betrayed by an ingenious paper bandage. The blinds, dislocated, threaten passers-by rather than screen the occupants. This door with an unclean air, and this window with an honest though dilapidated air, produce the effect of two incomplete beggars walking side by side under the same rags, the one having always been a mendicant, and the other having once been a gentleman. The staircase leads to a vast edifice which resembles a shed converted into a house: a long corridor, compartments more like stalls than cells, light from the vague waste grounds, spiders of enormous size. The postmen call the house Number 50-52. It is known in the neighbourhood as the Gorbeau house. Collectors of petty details know that about 1770 two attorneys at the Chatelet were named Corbeau and Renard. The opportunity was too fine. A limping parody of La Fontaine went through the galleries of the court-house. The two honest practitioners applied to the king. Louis the Fifteenth, who was already laughing that day, permitted Maitre Corbeau to add a tail to his initial letter and to call himself Gorbeau. Maitre Renard obtained only a P, and became Prenard. According to local tradition, this Maitre Gorbeau had been the proprietor of the building, and even the author of the monumental window. Hence the name.
Opposite the house rises a great elm which is three-quarters dead. The barrier is close at hand. In 1823 the city wall is still in existence. This barrier evokes gloomy fancies. It is the road to Bicetre. It was through it that prisoners condemned to death re-entered Paris on the day of their execution. A few steps more and one comes upon the pollarded elms of the Barriere Saint-Jacques, that expedient of the philanthropist to conceal the scaffold. Leaving aside that predestined place, probably the most mournful spot on that mournful boulevard, seven and thirty years ago, was the spot where stood the building Number 50-52. Bourgeois houses only began to spring up there twenty-five years later. One is conscious of being between the Salpetriere and Bicetre, that is to say, between the madness of women and the madness of men. As far as the eye can see: abattoirs, the city wall, factory fronts resembling barracks, hovels, ancient walls blackened like cerecloths, new white walls like winding-sheets, the melancholy sadness of right angles. Not an unevenness of the ground, not a caprice in the architecture, not a fold. Nothing oppresses the heart like symmetry. It is because symmetry is ennui, and ennui is at the very foundation of grief. 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, especially in winter, when the twilight breeze tears from the elms their last russet leaves, this boulevard suddenly becomes frightful. The passer-by cannot refrain from recalling the innumerable traditions of the place which are connected with the gibbet. By day it was ugly. In the evening melancholy. By night it was sinister. In summer, at twilight, a few old women sit at the foot of the elm, on benches mouldy with rain. These good old women are fond of begging. Even then the quarter is tending to transformation. Each day some detail of the whole effect is disappearing. For the last twenty years the station of the Orleans railway has stood beside the old faubourg and distracted it. 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. The old houses crumble and new ones rise. One morning in July, 1845, black pots of bitumen were seen smoking there. On that day it might be said that civilisation had arrived in the Rue de l'Ourcine, and that Paris had entered the suburb of Saint-Marceau.
