M. de Mareuil was at his side. Of the three other members of the committee, one was a doctor, who smoked a cigar and paid absolutely no attention to the rubble he was walking on, and two were businessmen, one of whom, a manufacturer of surgical instruments, had formerly been a knife sharpener who operated a grindstone on the street.
The path these gentlemen set out to follow was in terrible condition. It had rained all night. The soggy ground had turned into a river of mud between crumbling buildings, following a line marked out on earth so soft that carts hauling rubble sank in up to their axles. On either side stood sections of wall shattered by pickaxes. Tall buildings had been gutted so that their blanched entrails showed: empty stair-wells and gaping rooms hung in the air like the smashed drawers of some huge, ugly bureau. No sight could be sadder than the wallpaper in the bedrooms five or six stories up, yellow or blue squares now in tatters marking the places under the roofs where poor, wretched garrets had been—tiny holes that had once housed someone’s entire existence. Ribbons of flue pipe, depressingly black in color and with sharp elbows, climbed bare walls side by side. A forgotten weathervane made a grating sound as it rotated close to the edge of one roof, while half-detached gutters hung down like rags. And the chasm continued on into the ruins like a breach opened by cannon fire. The path of the roadway, still hard to make out, was filled with debris and marked by mounds of earth and deep puddles; on it went beneath gray skies, enveloped in a sinister cloud of falling plaster dust and lined by black ribbons of flue pipe, which were like the badges worn by mourners.
The visiting gentlemen, with their carefully polished boots, frock coats, and top hats, injected a singular note into this muddy landscape of brown filth in which the only things that moved were sallow workmen, horses spattered with mud all the way up their flanks, and wagons whose sides were completely coated with dust. They walked single file, jumping from stone to stone while mostly avoiding pools of liquid filth, but occasionally sinking in up to their ankles, which made them swear out loud and shake their feet. Saccard had suggested taking the rue de Charonne, which would have made it unnecessary to traverse this area of excavation, but unfortunately the committee had a number of buildings to visit up and down the lengthy boulevard. Driven by curiosity, they had decided to set a course right through the heart of the construction. In any case, it interested them greatly. At times one of them would stop and balance himself on a chunk of plaster lying in a rut, look up, and call the attention of the others to a gaping floor, a piece of flue pipe hanging in the air, or a beam that had fallen onto a neighboring roof. This razed section of city at the end of the rue du Temple actually struck them as quite funny.
“Now there’s something really unusual,” said M. de Mareuil. “Look up there, Saccard, at that kitchen. There’s still an old frying pan hanging over the stove. . . . I can make it out quite clearly.”
But the physician, his cigar clamped between his teeth, had planted himself in front of a demolished house, of which nothing remained but the rooms on the ground floor, now filled with rubble from the floors above. Only one section of wall rose above the heap of debris. To knock this wall down at one go, a rope had been wound around it, and thirty workmen were now pulling on that line.
“They won’t get it that way,” the doctor mumbled. “They’re pulling too much to the left.”
The other four men had retraced their steps in order to watch the wall come down. All five stared intently with bated breath as they waited, thrilled at the prospect of witnessing the collapse. The workers let the rope go slack and then suddenly gave another tug, shouting, “Heave, ho!”
“They won’t get it,” the doctor repeated.
Then, after a few seconds of anxious waiting, one of the businessmen gleefully shouted, “It’s moving, it’s moving!”
When the wall finally gave way, collapsing with a terrifying rumble that raised a cloud of plaster dust, the five gentlemen of the committee smiled at one another. They were enchanted. A fine powder settled onto their coats, turning their arms and shoulders white.
Now, as the men went back to picking their way among the puddles, the conversation turned to workers. There weren’t many good ones. They were all lazy, wasteful, and pigheaded and dreamed of nothing but their employers’ ruin. M. de Mareuil, who for the past minute had been nervously watching two poor devils perched on the corner of a roof as they attacked a wall with pickaxes, nevertheless voiced the thought that fellows like those displayed splendid courage. The others stopped once more and looked up at the demolition workers balanced on the edge of the roof as they bent their backs and swung their axes with all their might. The workmen kicked stones from the wall with their feet and watched calmly as they crashed to the ground. If their picks had missed their marks, the sheer momentum of their swings would have sent them plunging off the roof.
“Bah, they’re used to it!” said the doctor, putting his cigar back in his mouth. “They’re brutes.”
Meanwhile the members of the committee had reached one of the buildings they were supposed to inspect. They polished off their work in fifteen minutes and resumed their walk. Little by little they lost their fear of the mud. They walked right through puddles, abandoning all hope of keeping their boots dry. As they passed rue Ménilmontant, one of the businessmen, the former knife grinder, grew anxious. He scrutinized the ruins around him, and the neighborhood no longer seemed familiar. He had lived there more than thirty years before, he said, just after arriving in Paris, and it would please him greatly to locate the spot. He continued to cast his eyes about until the sight of a house cut in two by the demolition workers’ axes brought him up short in the middle of the path. He studied the building’s door and windows. Then, pointing at a corner of the ruin, he cried out, “There it is! I recognize it!”
“What are you talking about?” asked the doctor.
“My room, for heaven’s sake! That’s it!”
It was a small bedroom on the sixth floor that must once have overlooked a courtyard. A breach in one wall exposed the room, already demolished on one side, and a large section of wallpaper bearing a yellow floral pattern had been torn away from the wall and could be seen flapping in the wind. On the left you could still see the recess of a cupboard, lined with blue paper. And next to it was the hole for a stove, with a piece of pipe sticking out.
The erstwhile worker was gripped by emotion.
“I spent five years there,” he murmured. “Life was hard in those days, but it made no difference, I was young. . . . See that cupboard? That’s where I kept the 300 francs I saved sou by sou. And the hole for the stove—I can still remember the day I made it. The room had no fireplace, and it was bitter cold, all the more so because it wasn’t often that I was with somebody.”
“Hold on there,” the doctor interrupted in a jocular tone. “Nobody wants to know your secrets. You had your fun like everybody else.”
“That’s true,” the dignitary naïvely admitted. “I can still remember a laundress from the house across the street. . . . See up there, the bed was on the right, near the window. . . . What they’ve done to my poor bedroom!”
He was really quite sad about it.
“Now listen here,” said Saccard. “There’s nothing wrong with knocking down old dumps like these. They’re going to build fine new freestone houses in their place. . . . Would you still live in a hovel like that? Whereas on the new boulevard you’ll be able to find quite suitable housing.”
“That’s true,” repeated the manufacturer, who seemed quite consoled by the thought.