would happen in the street, when I certainly was not looking for
the likeness, and when probably there was no likeness there. It
was not because the creature was dead that I was so haunted,
because I know that I might have been (and I know it because I have
been) equally attended by the image of a living aversion. This
lasted about a week. The picture did not fade by degrees, in the
sense that it became a whit less forcible and distinct, but in the
sense that it obtruded itself less and less frequently. The
experience may be worth considering by some who have the care of
children. It would be difficult to overstate the intensity and
accuracy of an intelligent child’s observation. At that
impressible time of life, it must sometimes produce a fixed
impression. If the fixed impression be of an object terrible to
the child, it will be (for want of reasoning upon) inseparable from
great fear. Force the child at such a time, be Spartan with it,
send it into the dark against its will, leave it in a lonely
bedroom against its will, and you had better murder it.
On a bright morning I rattled away from Paris, in the German
chariot, and left the large dark creature behind me for good. I
ought to confess, though, that I had been drawn back to the Morgue,
after he was put underground, to look at his clothes, and that I
found them frightfully like him – particularly his boots. However,
I rattled away for Switzerland, looking forward and not backward,
and so we parted company.
Welcome again, the long, long spell of France, with the queer
country inns, full of vases of flowers and clocks, in the dull
little town, and with the little population not at all dull on the
little Boulevard in the evening, under the little trees! Welcome
Monsieur the Cure, walking alone in the early morning a short way
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
out of the town, reading that eternal Breviary of yours, which
surely might be almost read, without book, by this time! Welcome
Monsieur the Cure, later in the day, jolting through the highway
dust (as if you had already ascended to the cloudy region), in a
very big-headed cabriolet, with the dried mud of a dozen winters on
it. Welcome again Monsieur the Cure, as we exchange salutations;
you, straightening your back to look at the German chariot, while
picking in your little village garden a vegetable or two for the
day’s soup: I, looking out of the German chariot window in that
delicious traveller’s trance which knows no cares, no yesterdays,
no to-morrows, nothing but the passing objects and the passing
scents and sounds! And so I came, in due course of delight, to
Strasbourg, where I passed a wet Sunday evening at a window, while
an idle trifle of a vaudeville was played for me at the opposite
house.
How such a large house came to have only three people living in it,
was its own affair. There were at least a score of windows in its
high roof alone; how many in its grotesque front, I soon gave up
counting. The owner was a shopkeeper, by name Straudenheim; by
trade – I couldn’t make out what by trade, for he had forborne to
write that up, and his shop was shut.
At first, as I looked at Straudenheim’s, through the steadily
falling rain, I set him up in business in the goose-liver line.
But, inspection of Straudenheim, who became visible at a window on
the second floor, convinced me that there was something more
precious than liver in the case. He wore a black velvet skull-cap,
and looked usurious and rich. A large-lipped, pear-nosed old man,
with white hair, and keen eyes, though near-sighted. He was
writing at a desk, was Straudenheim, and ever and again left off
writing, put his pen in his mouth, and went through actions with
his right hand, like a man steadying piles of cash. Five-franc
pieces, Straudenheim, or golden Napoleons? A jeweller,
Straudenheim, a dealer in money, a diamond merchant, or what?
Below Straudenheim, at a window on the first floor, sat his