Page 1825 - les-miserables

obscurity, that we are about to shed a little light.
May we be permitted to recur, for the sake of clearness in
the recital, to the simple means which we have already em-
ployed in the case of Waterloo. Persons who wish to picture
to themselves in a tolerably exact manner the constitution
of the houses which stood at that epoch near the Pointe
Saint-Eustache, at the northeast angle of the Halles of Paris,
where to-day lies the embouchure of the Rue Rambuteau,
have only to imagine an N touching the Rue Saint-Denis
with its summit and the Halles with its base, and whose
two vertical bars should form the Rue de la Grande-Truan-
derie, and the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and whose transverse
bar should be formed by the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie.
The old Rue Mondetour cut the three strokes of the N at the
most crooked angles. So that the labyrinthine confusion of
these four streets sufficed to form, on a space three fathoms
square, between the Halles and the Rue Saint-Denis on the
one hand, and between the Rue du Cygne and the Rue des
Precheurs on the other, seven islands of houses, oddly cut
up, of varying sizes, placed crosswise and hap-hazard, and
barely separated, like the blocks of stone in a dock, by nar-
row crannies.
We say narrow crannies, and we can give no more just
idea of those dark, contracted, many-angled alleys, lined
with eight-story buildings. These buildings were so decrepit
that, in the Rue de la Chanvrerie and the Rue de la Petite-
Truanderie, the fronts were shored up with beams running
from one house to another. The street was narrow and the
gutter broad, the pedestrian there walked on a pavement

1825