文档介绍：FERRAGUS, CHIEF OF THE DEVORANTS
FERRAGUS, CHIEF OF
THE DEVORANTS
by HONORE DE BALZAC
Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley
DEDICATION
To Hector Berlioz.
1
FERRAGUS, CHIEF OF THE DEVORANTS
CHAPTER I
MADAME JULES
Certain streets in Paris are as degraded as a man covered with infamy;
also, there are noble streets, streets simply respectable, young streets on
the morality of which the public has not yet formed an opinion; also cut-
throat streets, streets older than the age of the oldest dowagers, estimable
streets, streets always clean, streets always dirty, working, laboring, and
mercantile streets. In short, the streets of Paris have every human quality,
and impress us, by what we must call their physiognomy, with certain
ideas against which we are defenceless. There are, for instance, streets of a
bad neighborhood in which you could not be induced to live, and streets
where you would willingly take up your abode. Some streets, like the rue
Montmartre, have a charming head, and end in a fish's tail. The rue de la
Paix is a wide street, a fine street, yet it wakens none of those gracefully
noble thoughts e 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 es more than th