You want a description of this hovel? I hesitated to inflict it upon
you. But you want it. I’ faith, here it is! You will only have yourself
to blame, it is your fault.
“Pshaw!” you say, “I know what it is. A bleared, bandy ruin. Some old
house!”
In the first place it is not an old house, it is very much worse, it is
a new house.
Really, now, an old house! You counted upon an old house and turned up
your nose at it in advance. Ah! yes, old houses; don’t you wish you may
get them! A dilapidated, tumble-down cottage! Why, don’t you know that a
dilapidated, tumble-down cottage is simply charming, a thing of beauty?
The wall is of beautiful, warm and strong colour, with moth holes,
birds’ nests, old nails on which the spider hangs his rose-window web,
a thousand amusing things that break its evenness. The window is only a
dormer, but from it protrude long poles on which all sorts of clothing,
of all sorts of colours, hang and dry in the wind-white tatters, red
rags, flags of poverty that give to the hut an air of gaiety and are
resplendent in the sunshine. The door is cracked and black, but approach
and examine it; you will without doubt find upon it a bit of antique
ironwork of the time of Louis XIII., cut out like a piece of guipure.
The roof is full of crevices, but in each crevice there is a convolvulus
that will blossom in the spring, or a daisy that will bloom in the
autumn. The tiles are patched with thatch. Of course they are, I should
say so! It affords the occasion to have on one’s roof a colony of pink
dragon flowers and wild marsh-mallow. A fine green grass carpets the
foot of this decrepit wall, the ivy climbs joyously up it and cloaks
its bareness--its wounds and its leprosy mayhap; moss covers with green
velvet the stone seat at the door. All nature takes pity upon this
degraded and charming thing that you call a hovel, and welcomes it.
0 hovel! honest and peaceful old dwelling, sweet and good to see!
rejuvenated every year by April and May! perfumed by the wallflower and
inhabited by the swallow!
No, it is not of this that I write, it is not, I repeat, of an old
house, it is of a new house,--of a new hovel, if you will.
This thing has not been built longer than two years. The wall has that
hideous and glacial whiteness of fresh plaster. The whole is wretched,
mean, high, triangular, and has the shape of a piece of Gruyère
cheese cut for a miser a dessert. There are new doors that do not shut
properly, window frames with white panes that are already spangled here
and there with paper stars. These stars are cut coquettishly and pasted
on with care. There is a frightful bogus sumptuousness about the place
that causes a painful impression--balconies of hollow iron badly fixed
to the wall; trumpery locks, already rotten round the fastenings, upon
which vacillate, on three nails, horrible ornaments of embossed brass
that are becoming covered with verdigris; shutters painted grey that are
getting out of joint, not because they are worm-eaten, but because they
were made of green wood by a thieving cabinet maker.
A chilly feeling comes over you as you look at the house. On entering
it you shiver. A greenish humidity leaks at the foot of the wall. This
building of yesterday is already a ruin; it is more than a ruin, it is
a disaster; one feels that the proprietor is bankrupt and that the
contractor has fled.
In rear of the house, a wall white and new like the rest, encloses a
space in which a drum major could not lie at full length. This is called
the garden. Issuing shiveringly from the earth is a little tree, long,
spare and sickly, which seems always to be in winter, for it has not a
single leaf. This broom is called a poplar. The remainder of the garden
is strewn with old potsherds and bottoms of bottles. Among them one
notices two or three list slippers. In a corner on top of a heap of
oyster shells is an old tin watering can, painted green, dented, rusty
and cracked, inhabited by slugs which silver it with their trails of
slime.
Let us enter the hovel. In the other you will find perhaps a ladder
“rickety,” as Regnier says, “from the top to the bottom.” Here you will
find a staircase.
This staircase, “ornamented” with brass-knobbed banisters, has fifteen
or twenty wooden steps, high, narrow, with sharp angles, which rise
perpendicularly to the first floor and turn upon themselves in a spiral
of about eighteen inches in diameter. Would you not be inclined to ask
for a ladder?
At the top of these stairs, if you get there, is the room.
To give an idea of this room is difficult. It is the “new hovel” in all
its abominable reality. Wretchedness is everywhere; a new wretchedness,
which has no past, no future, and which cannot take root anywhere. One
divines that the lodger moved in yesterday and will move out tomorrow.
That he arrived without saying whence he came, and that he will put the
key under the door when he goes away.
The wall is “ornamented” with dark blue paper with yellow flowers, the
window is “ornamented” with a curtain of red calico in which holes take
the place of flowers. There is in front of the window a rush-bottom
chair with the bottom worn out; near the chair a stove; on the stove a
stewpot; near the stewpot a flowerpot turned upside down with a tallow
candle stuck in the hole; near the flowerpot a basketful of coal which
evokes thoughts of suicide and asphyxiation; above the basket a shelf
encumbered with nameless objects, distinguishable among which are a worn
broom and an old toy representing a green rider on a crimson horse.
The mantelpiece, mean and narrow, is of blackish marble with a thousand
little white blotches. It is covered with broken glasses and unwashed
cups. Into one of these cups a pair of tin rimmed spectacles is
plunging. A nail lies on the floor. In the fireplace a dishcloth is
hanging on one of the fire-iron holders. No fire either in the fireplace
or in the stove. A heap of frightful sweepings replaces the heaps of
cinders. No looking glass on the mantelpiece, but a picture of varnished
canvas representing a nude negro at the knees of a white woman in a
decolletée ball dress in an arbour. Opposite the mantelpiece, a man’s
cap and a woman’s bonnet hang from nails on either side of a cracked
mirror.
At the end of the room is a bed. That is to say, a mattress laid on two
planks that rest upon a couple of trestles. Over the bed, other boards,
with openings between them, support an undesirable heap of linen,
clothes and rags. An imitation cashmere, called “French cashmere,”
protrudes between the boards and hangs over the pallet.
Mingled with the hideous litter of all these things are dirtiness, a
disgusting odour, spots of oil and tallow, and dust everywhere. In the
corner near the bed stands an enormous sack of shavings, and on a chair
beside the sack lies an old newspaper. I am moved by curiosity to look
at the title and the date. It is the “Constitutionnel” of April 25,
1843.
And now what can I add? I have not told the most horrible thing about
the place. The house is odious, the room is abominable, the pallet is
hideous; but all that is nothing.
When I entered a woman was sleeping on the bed--a woman old, short,
thickset, red, bloated, oily, tumefied, fat, dreadful, enormous. Her
frightful bonnet, which was awry, disclosed the side of her head, which
was grizzled, pink and bald.
She was fully dressed. She wore a yellowish fichu, a brown skirt, a
jacket, all this on her monstrous abdomen; and a vast soiled apron like
the linen trousers of a convict.
At the noise I made in entering she moved, sat up, showed her fat legs,
that were covered with unqualifiable blue stockings, and with a yawn
stretched her brawny arms, which terminated with fists that resembled
those of a butcher.