Chapter 106 Volume 4 Gorbo's Old House

Forty years ago, a traveler wandered alone in the deserted area near the Women's Hospice, then crossed the boulevard, walked up the Italian wicket, and arrived at the point where, we may say, Paris began to disappear.The place was not absolutely deserted, and there were still some pedestrians, and it was not yet a field, but there were still a few houses and a few streets; it was not a city, because on these streets, as on the roads, there were also tracks of wheels. ; nor is it a country, because the houses are too tall.What is that place?It was an uninhabited neighbourhood, a deserted and sometimes inhabited retreat, a thoroughfare of the metropolis, a street in Paris, bleaker than a forest at night, more miserable than a cemetery by day.

That is the ancient area where the horse market is located. The traveler, if he passes through the four old walls of the horse market, if he crosses Little Bankers Street again, and passes a cottage in the high wall on his right, he will see a meadow with piles of Oak bark, like some huge otter's nest; after passing, you will see a wall again, and inside the wall is a clearing, the ground is full of logs, roots, wood chips, shavings, and a dog stands on a pile and barks; Going further, there is a long and low wall, which is already broken and incomplete. The wall is covered with moss, which still blooms in spring, and there is a black door, which seems to be wearing mourning clothes; In the most desolate place, you will see a dilapidated house with a few large characters written on the wall: No posters; the aimless pedestrian will come to the corner of the Rue Saint-Marcel Vineyard, which is not a big place. Where someone knows.In that place at that time, near a factory and between two fences, there was a dilapidated house, which looked like a small hut at first glance, but was actually as big as a cathedral.Its side hilltops face the road, so it looks narrow.Almost the entire house was covered.Only the door and one window were exposed.

The shabby house had only one floor. When we looked carefully, the first thing that caught our attention was the door, which was only fitted on the broken kiln. As for the window, if it were not set on a gravel wall but on a stone wall, it would look like a stone wall. It will be like the windows of a rich man's house. The gate was a random patchwork of worm-eaten planks and battens that had not been properly worked.Immediately inside the gate was a straight staircase, with high steps, covered with mud, plaster, dust, and as wide as the gate, which we could see from the street, standing like a ladder between the two walls and disappearing at the top In the shadows.On the upper end of the shapeless door frame, there is a narrow thin wooden board, and a triangular hole is sawn in the middle of the board, which is the light hole and ventilation hole after the door is closed.On the back of the door, there is a number scribbled with a brush dipped in ink: 52, and above the bar, another number 50 is scrawled with the same brush, making it impossible to be sure.What is the number?The top of the door said number 50, but the back of the door retorted that it was wrong, it was number 52.A few dingy rags of indeterminate nature were hung above the triangular ventilation hole, serving as curtains.

The windows were wide and rather high, with shutters and large panes of glass, though the large panes, all broken in various ways, were cleverly concealed by many strips of paper, and at the same time more conspicuous, as for the two detached windows. The shutters with tenon and frame are not so much that they can protect the owner inside the window, it is better to say that they can only arouse the fear of passers-by outside the window.The blackout horizontal slats have been scattered, and some vertical wooden boards have been nailed randomly to make the original shutters into board windows.

The image of the gate is very bad, and the window is broken but still simple. They appear together on the top of the same house, it looks like two beggars who met by chance, begging together, relying on each other, both wearing the same rags, but Each has a different face, one was born poor, and the other came from a noble family. Walking up the stairs, you can see that it was originally a huge house, as if it was remodeled from a warehouse.In the middle of the upper floor, there is a long aisle, which serves as the main communication channel in the house; on the left and right sides of the aisle, there are large or small rooms, which can be used as housing when necessary, but it is better to say that these are small houses than small houses. some pigeon coops.Each of the rooms, which took light from the surrounding fields, was dark and dreary, wistful and melancholy, as gloomy as a tomb; here and there there were cracks in the doors and roofs, and depending on where the cracks were, cold light or drafts penetrated them. .Another interesting feature of this dwelling is the enormous size of the spider.

On the left side outside the gate facing the street, there is a small square window that is blocked, about one person's height above the ground, and it is full of stones thrown by passing children. Part of the house has recently been demolished.This part that has been preserved to this day can also make people imagine the whole picture of that year.The whole house is barely a hundred years old.A hundred years old is a period of youth for a house of worship, but a period of decay for a house in general.It seems that the houses that people live in will be short-lived because of people, and the houses that God lives in will also last forever because of God.

The postmen called the house No. 50-52, but people around there called it Gorbo's House. Talk about how the name came about. People who love to collect anecdotes and pin some forgettable dates to their brains know that in the previous century, around 1770, there were two prosecutors in the Châtelet Court, one named Colbert. , one named Lerner.Both names were foreseen by La Fontaine.This coincidence is too wonderful, so that the famous criminal masters don't want to be silly.Soon, such a crooked poem spread in the corridor of the court: The two self-respecting connoisseurs could not stand the banter, and their heads grew dizzy from the wild laughter that erupted behind them, so they decided to change their surnames, and applied to the King.When the application was sent to Louis XV, it was the Pope's envoy and Cardinal Laroche-Emmon who both knelt on the ground and waited for Madame du Barry to get out of bed barefoot, so that in front of the king, every The day when someone held a slipper and put it on her feet.The King was joking, and he was still joking, and turned the conversation from the two bishops to the two prosecutors, and wanted to give the two lord judges surnames, or give them surnames.The king allowed Lord Colbo to add a tail to his initial, and call him Gorbo; Lerner had less luck, and all he got was the addition of "P" before his initial "R." ", renamed Brener, because this new surname is not necessarily different from his original surname and himself.

According to local legend, this old Gorbo was once the owner of the house at No. 50-52 Hospital Road.He is also the creator of the majestic window. This is the origin of the name Gorbo Old House. Among the trees beside the road, a large elm tree, three-quarters dead, faced 50-52, and was almost opposite the corner of Cobran's Bianmen Street, which at that time had no houses. Even the middle of the street was not yet paved with stones, and there were some strange trees planted beside it, sometimes green, sometimes covered with mud, depending on the season, the street went all the way to the walls of Paris.The smell of sulfuric compounds rose from the roof of a nearby factory.

The access door is near there.The city wall still existed in 1823. This wicket reminds us of some dismal scenes.That's the road to Bisset.Condemned prisoners from the Empire and the Restoration had to pass through this place when they returned to Paris on the day of their execution.The mysterious murder in 1829, the so-called "Fontainbleau Murder", took place in this place. The judiciary has not found the murderer so far. It is still a tragedy with unknown truth. A terrifying charade unsolved.You go a few steps further, and you come to the ominous Rue de la Beard, where Urbach stabbed a shepherdess in Ivry, as if in a play, while the thunder sounded. .A few more steps, and you come to those hideous, decapitated elms at the St. Jacques gate, which are used by merciful people to cover the guillotine, where shopkeepers and gentry groups A vile and shameful Place de Grévet was erected, which they flinched from the death penalty, neither abolishing its majesty nor preserving its vigor.

Thirty-seven years ago, if we put aside the always gloomy, necessarily gloomy Place Saint-Jacques, then the place where the shabby house No. 50-52 is located is the whole dead road. Perhaps the deadliest part of town, an area that remains unattractive to this day. Rich people's homes didn't start appearing here until twenty-five years ago.At that time the place was full of desolation.The cupola of the Women's Workhouse is just visible, and the wicket to Bisset is so close at hand, that when you feel sad and oppressed here, you feel yourself somewhere between the Women's Workhouse and Bisset, that is to say. , between the madness of women and the madness of men.As far as we could look, all we could see were slaughterhouses, city walls, and the gate walls of a few factories that looked like barracks or seminaries. A new wall like a towel, surrounded by parallel trees, houses in a straight line, ordinary buildings, monotonous long lines, and right angles that make people feel infinitely sad.There are no ups and downs in the terrain, no ingenuity in the buildings, and no valleys.It was a grim, rigid, ugly whole.There is nothing more distressing than a symmetrical pattern, because a symmetrical image can make people depressed, and depression is the root of sadness, and disappointed people love to yawn.If one can find anything more terrible than the hell of misery, it must be the hell of depression.This little stretch of Hospital Road could serve as a gateway to such a hell, if such a hell existed.

When the night falls and the afterglow fades away, especially in winter, when the evening wind blows the last few yellow leaves from the rows of elms, when the sky is dark and the stars are not visible, or when the wind blows the clouds and the moon breaks Tomorrow, this road will suddenly look eerie.Those straight lines will all melt into the black shadow, like every inch of thread in the vast universe.Pedestrians on the road can't help but think of the countless murders that have occurred in this area over the years. This remote place where so many bloods have been shed really makes people shudder.People think that there are countless traps in the darkness, and all kinds of indescribable shadows seem suspicious, and the invisible square holes between trees seem to be graves.This place is ugly by day, sad by evening, and gloomy by night. In summer, near dusk, here and there some old women, with rain-soaked moldy stools, sit under elm trees and beg. Moreover, the appearance of the area is not so much ancient as outdated, and there was already a tendency to change its appearance at that time.From then on, those who want to see it must hurry.The whole is losing a little part of it every day.For twenty years, until today, the starting station of the Orleans Railway has been built beside this old suburb and has influenced it.The starting point of a railway, wherever we place it on the fringes of a capital, is the death of a suburb and the rise of a city.It seems that around these great centers where peoples come and go, in the gallop of those mighty locomotives, in the panting of the charcoal-breathing queer horses of civilization, the living earth shakes, engulfing the old dwellings and sending new ones to rest. generated.Old houses fall, new houses rise. Since the Orleans railway station invaded the area of ​​the women's almshouse, the ancient side streets around the Saint-Victor ditch and the Botanic Gardens have been shaken. Three or four times these side streets run violently, and at certain times squeeze the houses to the left and right.It is worth mentioning some curious and quite true phenomena. It is true that the sun in great cities makes the doors of houses face south, and so must the frequent traffic of traffic enlarge the streets.The signs of new life were evident, in the wildest corners of the village's old town, where stone pavements appeared and sidewalks began to wind and stretch even where no one had yet walked.On a morning, a memorable morning, in July 1845, smoke was suddenly seen here from a black pot burning asphalt; on this day, it can be said that civilization has come to the Rue Roulesing, Paris and Saint-Marie. The suburbs of Solskjaer are connected.