Explore "Toilers of the Sea" by Victor Hugo on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Forty years ago, St. Malo possessed an alley known by the name of the "Ruelle Coutanchez. " This alley no longer exists, having been removed for the improvements of the town.
It was a double row of houses, leaning one towards the other, and leaving between them just room enough for a narrow rivulet, which was called the street. By stretching the legs, it was possible to walk on both sides of the stream, touching with head or elbows, as you went, the houses either on the right or the left. These old relics of medieval Normandy have almost a human interest. Tumbledown houses and sorcerers always go together. Their leaning stories, their overhanging walls, their bowed penthouses, and their old thickset irons, seem like lips, chin, nose, and eyebrows. The garret window is the blind eye. The walls are the wrinkled and blotchy cheeks. The opposite houses lay their foreheads together as if they were plotting some malicious deed. All those words of ancient villany -- like cutthroat, "slit-weazand," and the like -- are closely connected with architecture of this kind.