Our Lady of Darkness by Bernard Capes — Read

Consistent in his theories of self-discipline, Ned took lodgings in a poor quarter of Paris with the widow Gamelle. Madame, a fruiterer in a small way of business, owned a little shop of semi-circular frontage that, standing like a river promontory at the north-west corner of the Rue Beautreillis -- where that tributary ditch of humanity ran into and fed the muddy channel of the Rue St Antoine -- seemed to have rounded from sharper outline in the age-long wash of traffic wheeling by its walls. From his window on the second floor the Englishman thus commanded a view of two streets, and, indeed, of three; for across the main thoroughfare the Rue Beautreillis, become now the Rue Royale, was continued until it discharged itself into a great house-enclosed _place_, as into a mighty reservoir of decorum built for the defecation of neighbouring vulgarities. Looking east, moreover, between the belfry towers of the convents of St Marie and La Croix, Ned's vision might reach, without strain, the very twilight mass of the Bastille; so that, as he congratulated himself, his situation was such as -- barring adventitious and unprofitable luxuries -- a blood prince with any imagination might have envied him.

For thence, often watching, speculative, he would see the scene-shifters of the early Revolution -- come out in front of the high, mute screen of the prison, that closed his vista eastwards as if it were a stage-curtain -- busy as bees on the alighting-board of a hive. Thence he would mark, in real ignorance of the plot of the forthcoming piece, or cycle of pieces, the motley companies gathering for rehearsal -- the barn-stormers; the heavy "leads;" the slighted tragedians foreseeing their opportunity for the fiftieth time; the inflated supers canvassing the favour of phantom houses with imagined gems of inspiration, with new lamps for old in the shape of misenlightened renderings of traditional _rôles_; he would mark the gas, so to speak, the artificial light that informed the garish scene with spurious vitality. But the prompter he could never as yet find in his place, nor could he gather the true import of the play to which, it must be presumed, all this pretentious gallimaufry was a prelude. Theorists, agitators, pamphleteers -- the open, clamorous expression of that that had been suggested only to him during his hitherto wanderings -- all these and all this were present to his eyes and his ears, passionlessly alert at their vantage-point on the second floor of the corner house in the Rue Beautreillis. Daily he sought to piece, from the struttings and the disconnected vapourings, the puzzle of present circumstance, the political significance of so much apparently aimless rhetoric. Daily he listened for the prompter's bell; daily looked for the appearance of the confident author who should discipline all this swagger and rhodomontade.