Explore "The Old City of Marseilles" by Aleksandr Kuprin on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
At the time that the new city, together with its splendid street of Cannobierre, is, about eleven o'clock at night, plunging into deep, bourgeois slumber -- at that time the old city comes to life.
The old city is a capricious, odd network of crooked, narrow little streets, through which it would be impossible even for a one horse cab to drive. What inconceivable stench, filth and darkness reign in this involved cloaka! All sorts of domestic refuse, swill, greens, oyster-shells -- everything is dumped on the street, or simply thrown out of the window. And it is not at all a rare sight to see in the street some swarthy lad or girl of six or seven paying the debt to nature in one of those poses that Teniers, Van Braouveur, and Teniers the Younger (Teneers) used to depict with such naive art on their canvases. There are in the old city such bylanes, narrow, dark even in the daytime, that one has to run through them, stopping one's nose with the fingers and holding the breath.