The Pension Vauquer is no more! Till yesterday, the structure which
Henry James felicitously described as “the most portentous setting of
the scene in all the literature of fiction” had, for a full hundred
years, remained substantially true to the picture that Honoré de Balzac
drew in the pages of “Père Goriot”. The house and the garden with its
well and graveled walk were there for the contemplation of the literary
pilgrim. Over all there was the brooding silence of ten decades. But
that was yesterday. There is little silence there to-day. For where
Trompe-la-Mort whispered his cunning temptations in the ear of Eugène
de Rastignac; where Goriot, the Lear of French fiction, wept over the
ingratitude of his daughters; where, of an eventful evening, there
came the tramping of feet, the clang of muskets against the pavement,
and the ominous command: “In the name of the King and the Law!” now
honks, not the horn of regal Renault or pompous Panhard, but the horn
of the ubiquitous Ford, or of its French equivalent, the Citroen. The
“most portentous setting of the scene in all the literature of fiction”
has become an auto-service station.
“Mme. Vauquer (_née_ de Conflams) is an elderly person, who
for the past forty years has kept a lodging house in the Rue
Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve in the district that lies between the Latin
Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marcel”. These are the opening words
of the novel that posterity seems to have accepted as Balzac’s
masterpiece, the most glorious stone of that vast edifice which is
the Comédie Humaine. The house stood at the lower end of the Rue
Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, just where the street begins to slope down
to the Rue de l’Arbalète. Balzac, in his day, found the quarter the
ugliest and the least known of all the quarters of Paris. Ugly and
unknown it remained all through the nineteenth century and the first
two decades of the twentieth. To find it to-day is like finding
one’s way to the heart of a maze. That remoteness had the virtue of
preserving it till the last from the invasion of the modern Hun, the
apartment constructing architect. Ugly as it is, it possesses an
amazing fascination. With the dirt and squalor and gloom the glamour
of the dark old world is there. Here is no Haussmannized Paris, but a
vestige of the ancient Lutetia that knew the Valois. The shades of the
Villon of history and of the Quasimodo of Hugo’s fantastic imagination,
lurk in such streets as the Rue Saint-Médard and the Rue Mouffetard.
Balzac identified the Pension Vauquer as being in the Rue
Sainte-Genevieve. But the names of Paris streets are subject to
frequent changes, and long ago the Rue Sainte-Genevieve became the
Rue Tournefort. The actual number of what was till yesterday, by
reason of its unchanged state, its romantic appearance, and its vivid
associations, the show place among all the shrines of French fiction,
was 24. From that doorway Eugène de Rastignac went forth in the night
to make his way to the heights of the cemetery of Père Lachaise, and
from its eminence to shake his fist at the city spread out beneath him
with the ringing cry of defiance: “A nous deux maintenant!”
_Arthur E. Bostwick_
One of the best known librarians in America, Arthur E. Bostwick, is
also editor, encyclopedist and author. White-haired, tall, powerful,
kindly, he has a sense of humor that is dry, keen and tempered by
years of wise study of life. Is there any better way to study life
than through mankind’s approach to books? Dr. Bostwick was born in
Litchfield, Connecticut. He spends his summers there now. He was
graduated from Yale University, where he was also a post-graduate
student, an instructor and a proctor. In his editorial capacity he has
been associated with “The Forum”, “The Literary Digest” and various
dictionaries. He is now chief of the St. Louis Public Library. His
books are numerous. I have seen him address a large group of his fellow
librarians, and he has the courage to tell stories on them as well as
about them. He has been active in his interest in politics, religion
and the public efforts of various communities. A serious-minded citizen
whose interest in books is abiding, and whose knowledge of them is
profound.