Page 1826 - les-miserables

that was always wet, skirting little stalls resembling cellars,
big posts encircled with iron hoops, excessive heaps of re-
fuse, and gates armed with enormous, century-old gratings.
The Rue Rambuteau has devastated all that.
The name of Mondetour paints marvellously well the
sinuosities of that whole set of streets. A little further on,
they are found still better expressed by the Rue Pirouette,
which ran into the Rue Mondetour.
The passer-by who got entangled from the Rue Saint-
Denis in the Rue de la Chanvrerie beheld it gradually close
in before him as though he had entered an elongated fun-
nel. At the end of this street, which was very short, he found
further passage barred in the direction of the Halles by a
tall row of houses, and he would have thought himself in
a blind alley, had he not perceived on the right and left two
dark cuts through which he could make his escape. This was
the Rue Mondetour, which on one side ran into the Rue de
Precheurs, and on the other into the Rue du Cygne and the
Petite-Truanderie. At the bottom of this sort of cul-de-sac,
at the angle of the cutting on the right, there was to be seen
a house which was not so tall as the rest, and which formed
a sort of cape in the street. It is in this house, of two sto-
ries only, that an illustrious wine-shop had been merrily
installed three hundred years before. This tavern created a
joyous noise in the very spot which old Theophilus described
in the following couplet:—

La branle le squelette horrible
D’un pauvre amant qui se pendit.

1826 Les Miserables