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Updated: June 5, 2025
The river, stretching wide as an estuary, was thronged with merchandise as the Tagus or the Thames: yachts were flying before the wind and steam-tugs laboured slowly against the stream, dragging behind the heavily-laden lighter. Warehouses and wharfs and timber-yards now begin to line either bank; yet the materials for a sketch-book are scanty and uninviting: an artist who, like Mr.
Just off the wharf, and facing the river at either corner of Queen Street, are two large and handsome hotels, while to right and left on the river frontage are sundry important commercial edifices. Passing to the left as we leave the wharf, we come to several extensive timber-yards, and to a long jetty, used exclusively as a timber-wharf.
Not a shop, not a vehicle, hardly a candle lighted here and there in the windows; all lights extinguished after ten o'clock. Gardens, convents, timber-yards, marshes; occasional lowly dwellings and great walls as high as the houses. Such was this quarter in the last century. The Revolution snubbed it soundly. The republican government demolished and cut through it.
Men had read it in other men's eyes. The tongue of a scold, the sneer of an injured woman had spread it, the birds of the air had carried it. From garret window to garret window across the narrow lanes of the old town it had been whispered at dead of night; at convent grilles, and in the timber-yards beside the river.
And everything outside was new; a large working-men's district had sprung up where there had once been timber-yards or water. Below him engines were drawing rows of trucks filled with ballast across the site for the new goods-station yard; and on the opposite side of the harbor a new residential and business quarter had grown up on the Iceland Quay.
One hope remained to him; it was, that the men had not, perhaps, stepped on the bridge, and had not caught sight of him while he was crossing the large illuminated space, holding Cosette by the hand. In that case, by plunging into the little street before him, he might escape, if he could reach the timber-yards, the marshes, the market-gardens, the uninhabited ground which was not built upon.
He bought a little round dumpling of a white pony, and trotted all over the country in search of building materials and builders, he discovered trees in distant timber-yards, he brought home specimens of stone, one in each pocket, to compare and analyse, he went to London to look at model schools, he drew plans each more neat and beautiful than the last, he compared builders' estimates, and wrote letters to the National Society, so as to be able to begin in the spring.
There are ear-wigs in the timber-yards of the Ursulines, there are millepeds in the Pantheon, there are tadpoles in the ditches of the Champs-de-Mars. As far as sayings are concerned, this child has as many of them as Talleyrand. He is no less cynical, but he is more honest.
Beyond the canal, between the houses which separated the timber-yards, the great pure sky was cut up into plates of ultramarine; and under the reverberating light of the sun, the white façades, the slate roofs, and the granite wharves glowed dazzlingly.
The high-gabled warehouses on the riverside could not be used for barracks, for they too had been crammed from floor to roof with stores and arms. So the soldiers slept where they could. They bivouacked in the timber-yards by the riverside.
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