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I have read, in some work of literary criticism, that Dickens could walk up one side of a long, busy street and down the other, and then tell you in their order the names on all the shop-signs; the fact was alleged as an illustration of his great powers of observation.
Elfish everything seems; for everything as well as everybody is small, and queer, and mysterious: the little houses under their blue roofs, the little shop-fronts hung with blue, and the smiling little people in their blue costumes. The illusion is only broken by the occasional passing of a tall foreigner, and by divers shop-signs bearing announcements in absurd attempts at English.
Taking a circuitous route, for greater precaution, I at last reached my destination. I seemed to be in a foreign country. Dark-eyed comely women and pretty children, dressed in gay colours, were walking up and down. The shop-signs and advertisements were mostly written in Hebrew characters, loud conversation in a foreign language accompanied by vivacious gesticulation, caught the ear.
Balzac used to look long among the shop-signs of Paris for the precise name needed by a preconceived character, and the absolute invention of such titles is doubtless very rare; few fictionists are gifted with Dickens's fertility in the discovering of names bearing the most forcible and occult relations to the fleshless owners of them.
None but Germans, and other Strangers, wore fine clothes; the French people mainly in rags, but powdered up to their eyebrows. Their coaches miserably horsed, and rope-harnessed; yet, in the way of Allegories on the panels, all tawdry enough for the Wedding of Cupid and Psyche. Their shop-signs extremely laughable.
The throngs in the streets were kaleidoscopic in costume and character: priests, soldiers, gendarmes, strange figures with turbans and other Oriental accoutrements; women gayly dressed and wearing their dresses with an air; men with curling mustachios, and with nothing to do, apparently, but amuse themselves; romantic artists with soft felt hats and eccentric beards; grotesque figures of poverty in rags and with ominous visages, such as are never seen in London; martial music, marching regiments, with gorgeous generals on horseback, with shining swords; church processions; wedding pageants crowding in and out of superb churches; newspapers, shop-signs, and chatter, all in French, even down to the babble of the small children.
There is a theatre, a museum, a town garden with a band, a good hotel.... No hideous fences, no absurd shop-signs, and no waste places with warming placards. There is a tavern called "Taganrog"; sugar costs twenty-four kopecks a pound, pine kernels six kopecks a pound. I am quite well. My money is safe. I am saving up my coffee for Sahalin.
Carried in the course of a night from Paris to that city, he had made his way through narrow streets where every basement window exhaled the fragrance of sauerkraut, and he had reached the cathedral square, beautified by Farina's shop-signs, where in front of the famous Dom he had been obliged to confess that this façade, this exterior, was a huge piece of patchwork a delusion.
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