The collectors of things not generally known, who make anecdotal herbals, and prick fugacious dates into their memory with a pin, know that there were in Paris, about the year 1770, two advocates at the Châtelet of the names of Corbeau and Renard,--two names foreseen by Lafontaine. The opportunity was too good to be neglected, and ere long the following parody, in rather halting verse, was in everybody's mouth:--
"Maître Corbeau, sur un dossier perché, Tenait dans son bec une saisie exécutoire; Maître Renard, par l'odeur alléché, Lui fit à peu près cette histoire: Eh, bonjour," etc.
The two honest lawyers, who were unable to hold their heads up under the outbursts of laughter that followed them, resolved to get rid of their names, and for that purpose appealed to the king. The petition was handed to Louis XV. on the very day when the Papal Nuncio kneeling on one side, and Cardinal de la Roche Aymon on the other, were drawing the slippers on to the bare feet of Madame du Barry, who had just left her couch. The king, who was laughing, continued to laugh, gayly passed from the two bishops to the two lawyers, and forgave them their names, or nearly so. By royal authority Master Corbeau was allowed to add a tail to his initial letter and become Gorbeau; but Master Renard was less fortunate,--he could only obtain leave to place a P before his R, and call himself Prenard, so that the second name was nearly as significant as the first. Now, according to local tradition, Master Gorbeau had been owner of the building numbered 50-52, on the Boulevard de l'Hôpital, and was even author of the grand window. From this has this tumble-down place the name of Maison Gorbeau. Opposite the house there stands, amid the boulevard trees, an elm which is nearly three parts dead; a little farther on is the Rue de la Barrière des Gobelins,--a street at that time without houses, unpaved, planted with badly-growing trees, and which ran straight down to the city walls. A copperas smell issues in puffs from the roof of an adjacent manufactory. The barrier was close by, and in 1823 the city walls were still in existence. The barrier itself cast a gloom over the mind, for it was on the road to Bicêtre. Under the Empire and the Restoration men condemned to death returned to Paris through it on the day of their execution. Here was committed, about the year 1829, that mysterious assassination called "the murder of the Barrière de Fontainebleau,"--a frightful problem which has never been elucidated, a mournful enigma which has never been solved. A few steps farther on you come to the fatal Rue Croulebarbe, in which Ulbach stabbed the woman who looked after the Ivry goats, to the sound of thunder, as in a melodrama. A few more steps and you reach the abominable pollard-elms of the Barrière St. Jacques, that philanthropic expedient concealing the scaffold, the paltry, disgraceful Place de Grève of a shop-keeping society, which has recoiled before the penalty of death, though not daring to abolish it with grandeur or keep it up with authority. Thirty-seven years ago, and leaving aside this place St. Jacques, which was, as it were, predestined, and has always been horrible, the gloomiest point perhaps of all this gloomy boulevard was that where No. 50-52 stood. Tradespeople did not begin to brood there till five-and-twenty years later. The place was morose, for you felt yourself between La Salpêtrière, whose dome was just visible, and Bicêtre, whose barrier you could touch; that is to say, between male and female mania. As far as the eye could reach, nothing was visible save the slaughter-houses, the city wall, and a few rare frontages of foundries, resembling barracks or monasteries. Everywhere were sheds and rubbish, old walls black as coffins, new walls white as winding-sheets; everywhere parallel rows of trees, buildings standing in rows, long odd lines, and the gloomy sadness of right angles. There was not a diversity of the soil, not a single architectural whim; the _ensemble_ was freezing, regular, and hideous. Nothing makes the heart so heavy as symmetry, because symmetry is ennui, and ennui is the basis of mourning, a yawning despair. It is possible to imagine something more horrible than an Inferno in which people suffer; it is one in which they are ennuyés. If such an Inferno existed, this section of the Boulevard de l'Hôpital might be its avenue.