A Living Lie
Paul Bourget
9781465659446
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
'The gates are closed, sir,' said the driver, bending down from his box. 'Closed at half-past nine!' exclaimed a voice from the interior of the cab. 'What a place to live in! You needn't trouble to get down. The pavement's dry—I'll walk.' The door of the vehicle swung open, and a young man stepped gingerly out, pulling the collar of his fur-lined coat a little more closely about his throat. The dainty patent-leather shoes that left just an inch of the embroidered silk socks visible, the plain black trousers and opera hat, showed that the wearer was in evening dress. The cab was one of those superior conveyances that ply for hire outside the Paris clubs, and the driver, little accustomed to this provincial corner of the city, began to peer, with almost as much interest as his fare, into the strange street that, although situated on the borders of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, had such an old-world look about it. At the time we write of—the beginning of February, 1879—the Rue Coëtlogon, running from the Rue d'Assas to the Rue de Rennes, still possessed the peculiarity of being shut off from the rest of the world by gates, while at night it was lit up by an oil lamp, hanging, in the old-fashioned way, from a rope swung right across the roadway. Since then the appearance of the place has changed a good deal. The mysterious-looking house on the right, standing in its own bit of garden, and affording no doubt a quiet retreat to some retiring old dame, has disappeared. The vacant land, that rendered the Rue Coëtlogon as inaccessible to vehicles on the one side as did the iron gates on the other, has been cleared of its heaps of stones. Gas jets have taken the place of the oil lamp, and only a slight unevenness in the pavement now marks the position of the posts upon which the gates hung. These were never locked, but only swung to at night; there was therefore no necessity for the young man to pull the bell, but before entering the narrow lane he stopped for a few moments to take in the strange scene presented by the dark outline of the houses on the left, the garden on the right, a confused mass of unfinished buildings at the bottom, and the old oil lamp in the middle. Overhead a bright wintry moon hung in the vast expanse of the heavens, through which sped a few swift-sailing clouds. As they scudded across the face of the moon, and flew off into the dark immensity beyond, they seemed only to enhance the metallic brilliancy of the luminary by the momentary shadow they cast in sweeping by.
