Monsieur Bergeret in Paris — A Closer Reading

that their stones had for him a tongue. The Rue Gît-le-Cœur had a particular attraction for him, and whenever he saw beside the keystone of a gateway or on a door which had once been flanked by a wrought-iron railing a notice to the effect that there was a flat to let, he would mount the stairs, accompanied by a sordid concierge, in an atmosphere that reeked of countless generations of rats, which was aggravated from floor to floor by the smell of cooking from poverty-stricken kitchens. The workshops of bookbinders or box-makers enriched it at times with the horrible odour of sour glue, and Monsieur Bergeret would depart filled with sadness and discouragement.

Home again, he would tell his sister and daughter, at the dinner-table, of the unfavourable results of his inquiries; Mademoiselle Zoe would listen calmly to his story. She had made up her mind to seek and to find a house herself. She regarded her brother as a superior person, but as one quite incapable of reasonable ideas concerning the practical affairs of life.

“I went over a flat to-day on the Quai Conti. I don’t know what you two would think of it. It looks out on a courtyard with a well, some ivy, and a statue of Flora, moss-grown, mutilated, and headless, perpetually weaving a garland of flowers. I also saw a small flat in the Rue de la Chaise. That looks out on a garden with a great lime-tree, one branch of which, when the leaves have grown, would enter my study. There is a big room that Pauline could have; she would make it charming with a few yards of coloured cretonne.”

“What about my room?” demanded Mademoiselle Zoe. “You never think of my room. Besides——”

She did not finish her sentence, as she took no particular notice of her brother’s reports.

“We may be obliged to move into a new house,” said Monsieur Bergeret, for he was a sensible man accustomed to subject his desires to reason.

“I’m afraid so, papa,” said Pauline. “But never mind, we will find you a tree reaching up to your window, I promise you.”

She followed her father’s investigations with perfect good nature, but without much personal interest, as a young girl undismayed by change, who vaguely feels that her fate is not yet determined, and lives the while in a species of anticipation.

“The new houses are better fitted up than the old ones,” continued Monsieur Bergeret, “but I do not like them, perhaps because I am more conscious, in the midst of a luxury that one can measure, of the vulgarity of a straitened life. Not that the mediocrity of my fortune distresses me, even on your account. It is the banal and commonplace that I detest.... But you will think me absurd.”

“What I dislike in new houses is the precise sameness of their arrangement. The structure of the apartment is only too visible from the outside. For a long while dwellers in cities have been accustomed to live one above another, and as your aunt won’t hear of a small house in the suburbs I am quite willing to put up with a third or fourth-story flat, and that is precisely why I cannot but regret giving up the idea of an old house. The irregularity of old houses makes the piling of flat upon flat more endurable. When I walk down a new street I find myself thinking that this superposition of households in modern buildings is, in its uniformity, ridiculous. The small dining-rooms perched one above the other with the same little windows and the self-same copper gaselier lighted every evening at exactly the same time; the same tiny kitchens with larders looking on the yard, the same extremely dirty maidservants; the same drawing-rooms, with their pianos one over the other. To my mind, the precision of modern houses reveals the daily functions of the creatures enclosed in them as plainly as though the floors and ceilings were of glass. And all these people who dine one above another, play the piano one above another, and go to bed one above another, in a perfectly symmetrical fashion—when one thinks of it, they offer a spectacle both comical and humiliating.”

“The tenants themselves would hardly think so,” said Mademoiselle Zoe, who had quite decided to settle in a new house.

“It is true,” said Pauline thoughtfully, “it is true, it is comical.”