History of Corinthe from Its Foundation — Les Misérables

The Parisians who nowadays enter the Rue Rambuteau near the Halles notice on their right, opposite the Rue Mondetour, a basket-maker's shop whose sign is Napoleon made wholly of willow. They 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, and the celebrated public-house called Corinthe. The later street has devastated all that. To picture the houses near the Pointe Saint-Eustache, imagine an N whose bars are those old lanes, cut at crooked angles by Mondetour, a labyrinth of seven islands of houses barely separated by dark crannies. The passer-by who entered the Chanvrerie beheld it close in like a funnel, and would have thought himself in a blind alley had he not seen two dark cuts to right and left. At the bottom of that cul-de-sac, at the angle of the cutting, stood a house of two stories only, a cape in the street. In this house an illustrious wine-shop had been merrily installed three hundred years before.

Tavern-keepers succeeded each other there from father to son. In Regnier's time the cabaret was the Pot-aux-Roses, with a rose-coloured post for a rebus. A painter who had got drunk many times at that table painted a bunch of Corinth grapes on the pink post, and the keeper, in his joy, put gilt letters beneath: At the Bunch of Corinth Grapes. Hence Corinthe. Nothing is more natural to drunken men than ellipses. The last proprietor of the dynasty, Father Hucheloup, no longer acquainted even with the tradition, had the post painted blue. He had invented stuffed carps that could be eaten nowhere else, and had brushed on his wall, as an orthographer on his own account, CARPES HO GRAS. Rain took the S and the G. What remained was CARPE HO RAS. A humble gastronomical announcement had become a profound piece of advice. Desirous simply of effacing Lent, he had equalled Horace, and that also meant: Enter my wine-shop.

Nothing of all this is in existence now. The Mondetour labyrinth was disembowelled in 1847. Corinthe was the meeting-place, if not the rallying-point, of Courfeyrac and his friends. It was Grantaire who had discovered it, on account of the Carpe horas, and who had returned on account of the carps. They did not pay much, they paid badly, they did not pay at all, but they were always welcome. Hucheloup was a wine-shop-keeper with a moustache, a fencing-master, a comic foundation under a tragic exterior, a snuff-box in the shape of a pistol. Come hear Father Hucheloup growl, said the young men. About 1830 he died, and with him disappeared the secret of stuffed carps. His inconsolable widow continued to keep the shop. The cooking became execrable, the wine fearfully bad, and still they went, out of pity. Two serving-maids, Matelote and Gibelotte, set on the tables the jugs of poor wine. Before entering the restaurant room, the visitor read on the door the line written there in chalk by Courfeyrac: treat if you can, and eat if you dare.