The Arcades Project - Operi

then ... there was scarcely a tavem or pastry shop where he would not look in to
see whether anyone-and, if so, who-might be there:' [M4a,2]
Menilmontant. 'In this immense quartier where meager salaries doom women and
children to eternal privation, the Rue de Ia Chine and those streets which join and
cut across it, such as the Rue des Partants and that amazing Rue Orfila, 80 fantastic
with its roundabouts and its sudden turns, its fences of uneven wood slats, its
uninhabited summerhouses, its deserted gardens reclaimed by nature where wild
shrubs and weeds are gl'owing, sound a note of appeasement and of rare calm . ...
It is a country path under an open sky where most of the people who pass seem to
have eatcn and drunk." J.-K. Huysmans, Croquis Par'isiens (Paris, 1886), p. 95
("La Rue de 1a Chine"). [M4a,3]
Dickens. "'In his letters . . he complains repeatedly when traveling, even in the
mountains of Switzerland, . .. about the lack of street noise, which was indispensable
to him for his writing. 'I can't express how much I want these [streets],' he
wrote in 184.6 from Lausanne, where he was working on one of his greatest novels,
Dombey and Son. 'It seems as if they supplied something to my brain, which it
cannot hear, when busy, to lose. For a week or a fortnight I can write prodigiously
in a retired place . .. and a day in London sets me up again and starts me. But the
toil and labor of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern, is immense
. ... My figures seem disposed to stagnate without crowds ahout them . ...
In Genoa . .. I had two miles of streets at least, lighted at night, to walk ahout in;
and a gt'eat theater to repair to, every night. "' l · '·Charles Dickens,"
Die nene Zeit, 30, no. 1 (Stuttgart, 1912), pp. 621-622. [M4a,4]
Brief description of misery; probahly under the hridges of the Seine. " A bohemian
woman sleeps, her head tilted forward, her empty purse hetween her legs. Her
blouse is covered with pins that glitter in the sun, and the few appurtenances of her
household and toilette-two brushes, an open knife, a closed tin-are so well
arranged that this semblance of order creates almost an ail.' of intimacy, the
shadow of an interiew; around her." Marcel Jouhandeau, Images de Paris (Paris