At wide intervals, a pale street-lamp casts its smoky and uncertain gleam, not seen at all in some of the blind alleys. Passers-by walk quickly and are uncommon. The shops are shut, those still open are of unsavoury character: a dirty wine-shop without lights, a linen-draper’s selling eau de Cologne. An unwholesome chill folds its damp mantle about your shoulders. Few carriages pass. Notable among these sinister spots are the rue de Langlade, the opening of the Passage Saint Guillaume and various street turnings elsewhere. The municipal Council has never yet found means to cleanse this great leper-house, for prostitution long ago established its headquarters there. Perhaps it is fortunate for Parisian society that these alleys should retain their foul aspect. Passing that way in the day-time, nobody could imagine what all those streets become at night; they are scoured by singular creatures who belong to no world; white, half-naked forms line the walls, the darkness is alive. Female garments slink by walking and talking. Half-open doors suddenly shout with laughter. Upon the ear fall those words which Rabelais claimed to have frozen and which now melt. Strumming music comes up between the flagstones. The sound is not vague, it means something: when it is raucous, that is a human voice; but if it contains notes of music, there is no longer anything human about it, only a whistling sound. Blasts on a whistle are indeed frequently heard. Provocative, mocking, the click of heels approaches and recedes. All these things together make the mind reel. Atmospheric conditions are changed in this region: it is hot in winter and cold in summer. But, whatever the weather, nature there offers the same curious spectacle: this is the fantastic world of the Berliner Hoffmann. Sent to inspect it, the meticulous clerk would no longer credit his senses once he had returned by the same turnings to decent streets in which there were passers-by, shops and light to see by. More disdainful or more easily shamed than the kings and queens of earlier times, who were not afraid to concern themselves with the courtesans in their cities, modern administration and politics dare no longer look this plague in the face. True, what is done must change with time and place, and measures which affect individual liberty are always a delicate matter; but a degree of breadth and boldness might be displayed in purely material schemes to do with air, light and building. The moralist, the artist and the wise administrator will regret the old Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal where the sheep were folded which appear wherever strollers go by; and is it not better for strollers to loiter where they are? What happened? Today the most brilliant stretches of the boulevards cannot be enjoyed in the evening by families for what should have been enchanted outings. The Police have failed to make a proper use of what are nevertheless called Passages, to spare the public way.

The girl crushed by a jest at the Opera ball had been living, for the past month or two, in the rue de Langlade, in a house of ignoble appearance. Ill-plastered against the wall of a much larger house, this construction without either breadth or depth, lighted only from the street, yet rises to a prodigious height, recalling the stick up which a parrot climbs. Each floor consists of a two-roomed apartment. The house is served by a narrow staircase against the outer wall, whose course may be traced from outside by fixed lights which feebly illuminate it within and on each landing of which stands a sink, one of the most horrible peculiarities of Paris. The shop and the living quarters immediately above it then belonged to a tinsmith, the owner lived on the first floor, the four floors above were occupied by well-behaved seamstresses to whom the owner and caretaker were indulgent because of the difficulty of letting a house so oddly constructed and situated. The neighbourhood had become what it was by reason of the fact that it contained so many just such houses, of no use to serious Commerce and thus able to be exploited only by unacknowledged, precarious or undignified trades.

Interior as familiar to some as unknown by others

AT three o’clock in the afternoon, the caretaker, who had seen Mademoiselle Esther brought back half-dead by a young man at two o’clock in the morning, had just been holding counsel with the grisette on the top floor, who, before taking a carriage to some party of pleasure, had evidenced disquietude about Esther, from whom she had heard no movement. No doubt Esther was still asleep, but she ought not to have been.