found the Rue d'Auseil. These maps have not been modem maps alone, for I know
that names change. I have, on the contrary, delved deeply into all the
antiquities of the place, and have personally explored every region, of whatever
name, which could possibly answer to the street I knew as the Rue d'Auseil. But
despite all I have done, it remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find the
house, the street, or even the locality, where, during the last months of my
impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the university, I heard the
music of Erich Zann.
That my memory is broken, I do not wonder; for my health, physical and mental,
was gravely disturbed throughout the period of my residence in the Rue d'Auseil,
and I recall that I took none of my few acquaintances there. But that I cannot
find the place again is both singular and perplexing; for it was within a
half-hour's walk of the university and was distinguished by peculiarities which
could hardly be forgotten by any one who had been there. I have never met a
person who has seen the Rue d'Auseil.
The Rue d'Auseil lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick
blear-windowed warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It
was always shadowy along that river, as if the smoke of neighboring factories
shut out the sun perpetually. The river was also odorous with evil stenches
which I have never smelled elsewhere, and which may some day help me to find it,
since I should recognize them at once. Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled
streets with rails; and then came the ascent, at first gradual, but incredibly
steep as the Rue d'Auseil was reached.
I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d'Auseil. It was
almost a cliff, closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of ffights
of steps, and ending at the top in a lofty ivied wall. Its paving was irregular,
sometimes stone slabs, sometimes cobblestones, and sometimes bare earth with
struggling greenish-grey vegetation. The houses were tall, peaked-roofed,
incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward, forward, and sidewise.
Occasionally an opposite pair, both leaning forward, almost met across the
street like an arch; and certainly they kept most of the light from the ground
below. There were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the street.
The inhabitants of that street impressed me peculiarly; At first I thought it
was because they were all silent and reticent; but later decided it was because
they were all very old. I do not know how I came to live on such a street, but I
was not myself when I moved there. I had been living in many poor places, always
evicted for want of money; until at last I came upon that tottering house in the
Rue d'Auseil kept by the paralytic Blandot. It was the third house from the top
of the street, and by far the tallest of them all.
