THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

The true Paris is by nature a dark, miry, malodorous city, confined within its narrow lanes, swarming with blind alleys, culs-de-sac, and mysterious passages, with labyrinths that lead you to the devil.  The true Paris is full of freak shows, repositories at three centimes a night for unheard-of beings and human phantasmagorias… reposing side by side are hundreds, thousands, of charlatans, of match sellers, of accordion players, of hunchbacks, of the blind and the lame; of dwarfs, legless cripples, and men whose noses were bitten off in quarrels, of rubber-jointed men, clowns making a comeback, and sword swallowers; of jugglers who balance a greasy pole on the tips of’ their teeth… children with four legs, Basque giants and other kinds, Tom Thumb in his twentieth reincarnation, plant-people whose hand or arm is the soil of a living tree, which sprouts each year its crown of branches and leaves; walking skeletons, transparent humans made of light, and whose faint voice can make itself heard to an attentive ear; orangutans with human intelligence; monsters who speak French.

Paul-Ernest de Rattier in Benjamin/Arcades