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Updated: June 21, 2025
He was one of the simple-minded, one whose simplicity was divine, and who had remained on the threshold of the temple, kneeling before the tapers which from a distance he took for stars. The hovel in the Impasse Saint-Mittre consisted, in the first place, of a large room into which the street door opened.
Whenever any caravan arrives at Plassans it takes up its quarters on the Aire Saint-Mittre. The place is consequently never empty. There is always some strange band there, some troop of wild men and withered women, among whom groups of healthy-looking children roll about on the grass.
Such a disregard of propriety seemed monstrous out of all reason. And the scandal was heightened by Adelaide's strange choice. At that time there dwelt at the end of the Impasse Saint-Mittre, in a hovel the back of which abutted on the Fouques' land, a man of bad repute, who was generally referred to as "that scoundrel Macquart."
People began to flock to the Aire Saint-Mittre, the urchins of the Faubourg remained there, romping about the beams, and shouting, till eleven o'clock at night. It even happened occasionally that one of them would go and hide behind the piles of timber, and assail Miette and Silvere with boyish jeers.
She was still lying there in all her purity, wrapped in the red banner, her head slightly raised, and her big eyes turned upward towards heaven. It was about five o'clock in the morning when Rougon at last ventured to leave his mother's house. The old woman had gone to sleep on a chair. He crept stealthily to the end of the Impasse Saint-Mittre. There was not a sound, not a shadow.
Enclosed upon three sides, the Aire Saint-Mittre leads nowhere, and is only crossed by people out for a stroll. In former times it was a cemetery under the patronage of Saint-Mittre, a greatly honoured Provencal saint; and in 1851 the old people of Plassans could still remember having seen the wall of the cemetery standing, although the place itself had been closed for years.
When he was quite young, he had been in the habit of playing in the workshop of a master wheelwright, a worthy man named Vian, who lived at the entrance of the blind-alley in front of the Aire Saint-Mittre where he stored his timber.
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