rchitecture, not a fold. The ensemble was glacial,
regular, hideous. Nothing oppresses the heart like symmetry. It is
because symmetry is ennui, and ennui is at the very foundation of grief.
Despair yawns. Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers
may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored. If such a hell
existed, that bit of the Boulevard de l'Hopital might have formed the
entrance to it.

Nevertheless, at nightfall, at the moment when the daylight is
vanishing, especially in winter, at the hour when the twilight breeze
tears from the elms their last russet leaves, when the darkness is deep
and starless, or when the moon and the wind are making openings in the
clouds and losing themselves in the shadows, this boulevard suddenly
becomes frightful. The black lines sink inwards and are lost in the
shades, like morsels of the infinite. The passer-by cannot refrain from
recalling the innumerable traditions of the place which are connected
with the gibbet. The solitude of this spot, where so many crimes have
been committed, had something terrible about it. One almost had a
presentiment of meeting with traps in that darkness; all the confused
forms of the darkness seemed suspicious, and the long, hollow square, of
which one caught a glimpse between each tree, seemed graves: by day it
was ugly; in the evening melancholy; by night it was sinister.

In summer, at twilight, one saw, here and there, a few old women seated
at the foot of the elm, on benches mouldy with rain. These good old
women were fond of begging.

However, this quarter, which had a superannuated rather than an antique
air, was tending even then to transformation. Even at that time any one
who was desirous of seeing it had to make haste. Each day some detail of
the whole effect was disappearing. For the last twenty years the station
of the Orleans railway has stood beside the old faubourg and distracted
it, as it does to-day. Wherever it is placed on the borders of a
capital, a railway station is the death of a suburb and the birth of a
city. It seems as though, around these great centres of the movements of
a people, the earth, full of germs, trembled and yawned, to engulf the
ancient dwellings of men and to allow new ones to spring forth, at the
rattle of these powerful machines, at the breath of these monstrous
horses of civilization which devour coal and vomit fire. The old houses
crumble and new ones rise.

Since the Orleans rail