La Bilvre of Paint-ftivarie. Par J. K. Humans. (Stuck.,
Paris.) — M. Huysmaas has for the moment deserted the investigation of magic, black or white, and has turned again to the picturesque, in the seareh for which he won his earliest glory. La Bievre et Saint-Sherif& will not be rewarded by the success of scandal, which attended " Li-Bas " and " La Cath6drale." Yet none the less it is a remarkable work, simply conceived and exquisitely written. For M. Huysmans is master of a curious, elaborate style, and the practice of realism, which long since ho despised, at least taught him to observe. In this his latest work, the n, be has employed his double gift of vision and word- painting. He has chosen two forgotten quarters of Paris, and has described them with a gruesome sense of their poverty- stricken horror and their stately dilapidation, which never verges upon melodrama. Beneath the shadow of the Gobelins, watered by the once romantic Biivre, there is a little corner which is unknown to Paris, and from which the inhabi- tants never emerge. There huddle the men and women who toil in tanneries and dye-works, and there the intrepid wayfarer may enjoy an unaccustomed experience. The river, now a mere ditch, is scrawled over with the slime of many colours. Strange houses, from whose windows gaze stranger faces, are perched at odd corners or flank the steep and tortuous alleys. Readers of " Les Mis6rables" may remember that Gavroche passed that way, but if M. Huysmans did not discover this unknown land, at least he has revived a swiftly fading memory. Of more varied in- terest, yet less remote, is the Quartier Saint-S6verin, haunted to-day, as it was haunted centuries ago, by the thieves and brigands of Paris. But it is not merely a quarter of ill-fame It is glorified by those contrasts which make Paris the noblest of cities. As you thread this network of streets so strangely titled (it is impossible to better the names of the Rues Git-le- Cceur and du Chat qui Peche) you come upon the splendid Churoh of Saint-S6verin and the hapless ruin of St. Julien-le-Pauvre, the oldest church in Paris, now transformed out of all seeming by the decoration of Archimandrites. And there, on the edge of the vanished Place Maubert, "ls Maub," as its frequenters used to call it, is the Rue Galande, famous for the Cbttean Rouge, once the house of Gabrielle d'Estrie, now the club of the worst criminals in France. There is no grimier haunt in Europe, and few more interesting. Hither notorious burglars and assassins come night after night, well knowing that the proprietor is but a detective, knowing also that they, poor devils, have nowhere else to go. This tavern M. Huysmans has described in terms at once so moving and so just, that his pages produce a sensation of horror which the present writer, though he has seen the place, never felt before. But M. Huysmans's book is not a mere piece of ornamental writing. It is a record as well. These half-known corners of Paris are doomed to perish at the approach of the unsheltered, convenient boulevard, and then M. Huysmans's picturesque pages will earn the dignity of historic documents. Meanwhile, those who still haunt the Quartier Saint-S6verin, or wander by the bank of the melancholy Wins, now buried in a drain, will understand their truth and vividness.
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