A Street of Paris and Its Inhabitant

by Honoré de Balzac

In this wall is a door, the famous little garden door, so necessary to dramas and to novels, which is beginning to disappear from Paris.

This door, painted in dark green, having an invisible lock, and on which the tax collector had not yet painted a number; this wall, along which grow thistles and grass with beaded blades; this street, with furrows made by the wheels of wagons; other walls gray and crowned with foliage, are in harmony with the silence that reigns in the Luxembourg, in the convent of the Carmelites, in the gardens of the Rue de Fleurus.

If you went there, you would ask yourself, "Who can possibly live here?"

Who? Wait and see.

II

SILHOUETTE OF THE INHABITANT