N at the most crooked angles,
so that the labyrinthine confusion of these four streets sufficed to
form, on a space three fathoms square, between the Halles and the Rue
Saint-Denis on the one hand, and between the Rue du Cygne and the Rue
des Precheurs on the other, seven islands of houses, oddly cut up, of
varying sizes, placed crosswise and hap-hazard, and barely separated,
like the blocks of stone in a dock, by narrow crannies.

We say narrow crannies, and we can give no more just idea of those dark,
contracted, many-angled alleys, lined with eight-story buildings. These
buildings were so decrepit that, in the Rue de la Chanvrerie and the Rue
de la Petite-Truanderie, the fronts were shored up with beams running
from one house to another. The street was narrow and the gutter broad,
the pedestrian there walked on a pavement that was always wet, skirting
little stalls resembling cellars, big posts encircled with iron hoops,
excessive heaps of refuse, 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 funnel. 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 stories 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.[47]

The situation was good, and tavern-keepers succeeded