Facino Cane

Excerpt

I once used to live in a little street which probably is not known to you—­the Rue de Lesdiguieres.  It is a turning out of the Rue Saint-Antoine, beginning just opposite a fountain near the Place de la Bastille, and ending in the Rue de la Cerisaie.  Love of knowledge stranded me in a garret; my nights I spent in work, my days in reading at the Bibliotheque d’Orleans, close by.  I lived frugally; I had accepted the conditions of the monastic life, necessary conditions for every worker, scarcely permitting myself a walk along the Boulevard Bourdon when the weather was fine.  One passion only had power to draw me from my studies; and yet, what was that passion but a study of another kind?  I used to watch the manners and customs of the Faubourg, its inhabitants, and their characteristics.  As I dressed no better than a working man, and cared nothing for appearances, I did not put them on their guard; I could join a group and look on while they drove bargains or wrangled among themselves on their way home from work.  Even then observation had come to be an instinct with me; a faculty of penetrating to the soul without neglecting the body; or rather, a power of grasping external details so thoroughly that they never detained me for a moment, and at once I passed beyond and through them.  I could enter into the life of the human creatures whom I watched, just as the dervish in the Arabian Nights could pass into any soul or body after pronouncing a certain formula.