Thereis no more use thinking about it. I will never be a landowner; andyet, how many times on the 8th or the 15th of eachquarter (around Paris, at any rate), have I sung the refrain of M. Vautour:
Whenone does not have enough to pay one’s rent
Onemust have a house of one’s own!
I would have constructed such a light building in thisvineyard! . . . A little villa in the style of Pompeii, with an impluvium and a cella, something like the house of the tragic poet. PoorLaviron, who died at the walls of Rome, had drawn out the plan for me.– Yet, totell the truth there are no landowners on the hills of Montmartre. One cannot legally establish ownership on this terrain undermined by thecavities populated by mammoths and mastodons on their inner walls. Thetown concedes a right of possession which expires after a hundred years. .. They are camped out like Turks; and the most progressive tenet wouldhardly contest such a transient claim, in which the right of inheritance cannotbecome established at length. *
*Certain landowners repudiate this detail,something which I have heard others affirm. Would this not also result inusurpations similar to those which gave back hereditary fiefs under HuguesCapet!
NOTES:
1. Excerpt from Gerard de Nerval, Walks andMemories (1854) (trans. Marc Lowenthal), published in Aurelia and OtherWritings, Boston, Exact Change, 1996.
2. Illustrations:
Top: Alvin Langdon Coburn, Moor Park, Rickmansworth, 1914.
Center: Brassai, Chez Suzy, Rue Gregoire de Tours, 1932.
Below: Diego Velasquez, Villa Medici, Façade of the Grotto Loggia, 1630.
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