At seven o’clock the Baron, seeing his brother, his son, the Baroness, and Hortense all engaged in playing whist, left to go and applaud his mistress at the Opera. He took with him Cousin Bette, who lived in the Rue du Doyenné and always made the loneliness of that deserted neighbourhood a pretext for leaving after dinner.
Parisians will all admit that the old maid’s caution was perfectly reasonable.
The existence of the block of houses alongside the old Louvre is one of those manifestations against common sense which the French love to make so that Europe should be reassured about the amount of intelligence bestowed on them and fear them no longer. Perhaps, without realizing it, we have hit here upon some political idea.
It will certainly not be irrelevant to describe this corner of present-day Paris. In the future it would be impossible to imagine it, and our nephews, who no doubt will see the completed Louvre, would refuse to believe that such a horror endured for thirty-six years, in the heart of Paris, opposite the palace where three dynasties, during the last thirty-six years, received the élite of France and Europe.
Anyone who comes to Paris, even for only a few days, notices, between the wicket-gate that leads to the Pont du Carrousel and the Rue du Musée, ten or so houses with decaying façades. Their disheartened owners carry out no repairs and they are the remains of an old quarter which has been in process of demolition since the day Napoleon decided to complete the Louvre. The Rue and the Impasse du Doyenné are the only streets in this dark, deserted block whose inhabitants are probably ghosts, for you never see anyone there. The pavement, much lower than the roadway of the Rue du Musée, is on the same level as that of the Rue Froidmanteau. Half-buried already by the raising of the square, these houses are permanently in the shadow of the tall galleries of the Louvre, which on that side are blackened by the north wind. The darkness, the silence, the icy blast, the low-lying cave-like site, all combine to make these houses seem like crypts, living tombs.
When one drives in a cab past this lifeless remnant of a district and looks down the narrow Rue du Doyenné, one’s soul is chilled, one wonders who can live there, what must happen there after dark, when the lane becomes a haunt of criminals and when the vices of Paris, wrapped in the cloak of night, indulge themselves to the full.
The problems of the area, already alarming enough, become appalling when one sees that these so-called houses are bounded by a marsh on the Rue de Richelieu side, by a sea of heaped-up paving-stones on the Tuileries side, by little gardens and evil-looking hovels on the side opposite the galleries, and by expanses of hewn stone and demolitions on the side facing the old Louvre.
Henri III and his favourites,* looking for their breeches, Marguerite’s lovers,* looking for their heads, must dance sarabands by moonlight in these deserted spots which are overlooked by the vault of a chapel, still standing, as if to prove that the Catholic religion, so deeply rooted in France, survives everything.
For nearly forty years now the Louvre has been shrieking through every gash in its ripped-up walls: ‘Root out these warts from my face!’ The authorities have no doubt recognized the utility of this cut-throats’ den and the necessity of symbolizing, in the heart of Paris, the intimate alliance of poverty and luxury characteristic of the queen of capitals. So these cold ruins, in whose heart the legitimist newspaper* contracted the disease from which it is dying, the squalid hovels in the Rue du Musée, the boarded-over area ringed with stall-holders, may have a longer and more prosperous life than three dynasties.
Since 1823, the low rent of rooms in the houses destined for demolition had led Cousin Bette to establish herself there, in spite of the requirement, imposed on her by the state of the district, of being home before nightfall. This necessity, however, was in accord with the villager’s habit, which she had retained, of going to bed and getting up with the sun, which enables country people to make considerable savings in heating and lighting. She lived, then, in one of the houses which, thanks to the demolition of the famous mansion formerly occupied by Cambacérès,* now had a view of the square.