Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [16]
Émile Zola
15 April 1868
I
At the end of the Rue Guénégaud, if you follow it away from the river, you find the Passage du Pont-Neuf, a sort of dark, narrow corridor linking the Rue Mazarine to the Rue de Seine.1 This passageway is, at most, thirty paces long and two wide, paved with yellowish, worn stones which have come loose and constantly give off an acrid dampness. The glass roof, sloping at a right angle, is black with grime.
On fair summer days when the sun burns down heavily on the streets, a whitish light penetrates the dirty panes of glass and lurks miserably about the arcade. On foul winter days, on a foggy morning, the glass roof casts only shadows over the slimy paving: mean, soiled shadows.
Built into the left wall are dark, low, flattened shops which exhale the dank air of cellars. There are secondhand booksellers, toyshops and paper merchants whose displays sleep dimly in the shades, grey with dust. The little square panes of the shop windows cast strange, greenish reflections on the goods inside. Behind them, the shops are full of darkness, gloomy holes in which weird figures move around.
On the right, along the whole length of the passageway, there is a wall, against which the shopkeepers opposite have set up narrow cupboards; nameless objects, goods forgotten for twenty years, lie there on narrow shelves painted a repellent shade of brown. A woman selling costume jewellery does business from one of the cupboards, offering rings at fifteen sous,2 delicately placed on a bed of blue velvet at the bottom of a mahogany box.
Above the glass roof, the wall extends, black, crudely rendered, as though stricken with leprosy and crisscrossed with scars.
This Passage du Pont-Neuf is not a place for strolling. People use it to avoid making a detour, to gain a few minutes. Down it walk busy folk whose only thought is to march briskly straight ahead. You see apprentices in their aprons, seamstresses delivering their finished work, and men and women with parcels under their arms. You also see old men lurking in the dreary light of the glass roof, and gangs of little children who come running here after school to kick up a row, banging their clogs on the pavement. The crisp, hurried sound of footsteps on stone rings out all day long with irritating irregularity. No one speaks, no one stops; all these people are speeding past on their business, walking quickly along with downcast eyes, without sparing a single glance for the displays of goods. The shopkeepers look suspiciously at any passer-by who by a miracle happens to pause in front of their windows.
In the evening, the arcade is lit by three gaslights enclosed in heavy, square lanterns. These hang down from the glass roof, on which they cast patches of yellowish light, spreading pale circles of luminescence around them that shimmer and appear to vanish from time to time. The passageway looks as though it might really be a hiding-place for cutthroats; great shadows spread across the paving and damp draughts blow in from the street; it has the appearance of an underground gallery dimly lit by three funerary lanterns. The shopkeepers make do with nothing more than the meagre illumination that the gas lamps cast on their windows. Inside the shops, they merely set up a lamp with a shade on a corner of the counter, which allows passers-by to detect what is lurking at the back of these holes where darkness inhabits even in daytime. Along the dingy line of windows, that of a paper merchant shines out: the yellow flames of two shale-oil lamps burn into the blackness. And, on the opposite side, a candle stuck into the glass mantle of an oil lamp puts glimmering stars in the box of costume jewellery. The woman who owns the shop is dozing at the back of her cupboard, with her hands wrapped in a shawl.
A few years ago, facing this jewellers’, there was a shop with bottle-green woodwork oozing humidity from every crack. The sign was a long narrow plank with the word Haberdashery in black;