Chapter 4

VISIONS OF THE REAL.

THE HOVEL.

You want a description of this hovel? I hesitated to
inflict it upon you. But you want it. I' faith, here it is!
You will only have yourself to blame, it is your fault.

"Pshaw!" you say, "I know what it is. A bleared,
bandy ruin. Some old house!"

In the first place it is not an old house, it is very much
worse, it is a new house.

Really, now, an old house! You counted upon an old
house and turned up your nose at it in advance. Ah! yes,
old houses; don't you wish you may get them! A
dilapidated, tumble-down cottage! Why, don't you know
that a dilapidated, tumble-down cottage is simply charming,
a thing of beauty? The wall is of beautiful, warm and strong
colour, with moth holes, birds' nests, old nails on which the
spider hangs his rose-window web, a thousand amusing
things that break its evenness. The window is only a
dormer, but from it protrude long poles on which all sorts
of clothing, of all sorts of colours, hang and dry in the
wind-white tatters, red rags, flags of poverty that give to
the hut an air of gaiety and are resplendent in the sunshine.
The door is cracked and black, but approach and examine
it; you will without doubt find upon it a bit of antique
ironwork of the time of Louis XIII., cut out like a piece
of guipure. The roof is full of crevices, but in each crevice
there is a convolvulus that will blossom in the spring, or a
daisy that will bloom in the autumn. The tiles are patched
with thatch. Of course they are, I should say so! It affords
the occasion to have on one's roof a colony of pink
dragon flowers and wild marsh-mallow. A fine green grass
carpets the foot of this decrepit wall, the ivy climbs
joyously up it and cloaks its bareness--its wounds and its
leprosy mayhap; moss covers with green velvet the stone
seat at the door. All nature takes pity upon this
degraded and charming thing that you call a hovel, and
welcomes it. 0 hovel! honest and peaceful old dwelling,
sweet and good to see! rejuvenated every year by April
and May! perfumed by the wallflower and inhabited by
the swallow!

No, it is not of this that I write, it is not, I repeat, of
an old house, it is of a new house,--of a new hovel, if you
will.

This thing has not been built longer than two years. The
wall has that hideous and glacial whiteness of fresh plaster.
The whole is wretched, mean, high, triangular, and has the
shape of a piece of Gruyère cheese cut for a miser a
dessert. There are new doors that do not shut properly,
window frames with white panes that are already spangled
here and there with paper stars. These stars are cut
coquettishly and pasted on with care.