FACINO CANE FACINO CANE BY HONORE DE BALZAC Translated By Clara Bell and others 1 FACINO CANE 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 e to be an instinct with me; a faculty of rating 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. If I met a working man and his wife in the streets between eleven o'clock and midnight on their way home from the ique, I used to amuse myself by following them from the Boulevard du Pont aux Choux to the Boulevard Beaumarchais. The good folk would begin by talking about the play; then from one thing to another they e to their own affairs, and the mother would walk on and on, heedless of complaint
