Literature

17 December 1898.

NOTES

A precious early fragment of another French novelist has just appeared. Only collectors of M. Huysmans’ work, perhaps, possess the little oblong pamphlet in which he celebrated the "Bièvre" and the quarter of the Gobelins. Although the original edition is only eight or nine years old, it has already become the sole record, apart from the newspapers, of that little tributary of the Seine now hidden from view by the engineers who have rendered it a subterranean river. M. Huysmans has always had a tenderness for these crisp pages, and he has done well to republish them. They have just appeared afresh from the house of Stock, the publisher of "La Bas," "En Route," and La Cathédrale," with the addition of a series of unpublished studies on the Saint-Séverin quarter; "La Bièvre et Saint-Séverin" is the title.

The hatred of the engineers [says M. Huysmans] for everythings which is still marked with an artistic stamp is indefatigable, and they will stop only when they will have completely abolished the last traces of the Paris of the old time. After this melancholy and charming Bièvre which they have finally killed, burying it in a sewer, it is going to be the turn of Saint-Séverin; this is the order of things.