文档介绍:A Second Home
A Second Home
Honore de Balzac
Translated by Clara Bell
1
A Second Home
A SECOND HOME
The Rue du Tourniquet-Saint-Jean, formerly one of the darkest and
most tortuous of the streets about the Hotel de Ville, zigzagged round the
little gardens of the Paris Prefecture, and ended at the Rue Martroi, exactly
at the angle of an old wall now pulled down. Here stood the turnstile to
which the street owed its name; it was not removed till 1823, when the
Municipality built a ballroom on the garden plot adjoining the Hotel de
Ville, for the fete given in honor of the Duc d'Angouleme on his return
from Spain.
The widest part of the Rue du Tourniquet was the end opening into the
Rue de la Tixeranderie, and even there it was less than six feet across.
Hence in rainy weather the gutter water was soon deep at the foot of the
old houses, sweeping down with it the dust and refuse deposited at the
corner-stones by the residents. As the dust-carts could not pass through,
the inhabitants trusted to storms to wash their always miry alley; for how
could it be clean? When the summer sun shed its perpendicular rays on
Paris like a sheet of gold, but as piercing as the point of a sword, it lighted
up the blackness of this street for a few minutes without drying the
permanent damp that rose from the ground-floor to the first story of these
dark and silent tenements.
The residents, who lighted their lamps at five o'clock in the month of
June, in winter never put them out. To this day the enterprising wayfarer
who should approach the Marais along the quays, past the end of the Rue
du Chaume, the Rues de l'Homme Arme, des Billettes, and des Deux-
Portes, all leading to the Rue du Tourniquet, might think he had passed
through cellars all the way.
Almost all the streets of old Paris, of which ancient chronicles laud the
magnificence, were like this damp and gloomy labyrinth, where the
antiquaries still find historical curiosities to admire. F