Social life is undergoing a great evolution. I see women, children, households, families in this café. The interior is doomed. Life threatens to become public. The club for the top rank, the café for the bottom: that is where society and the crowd will end up … I have a sensation of passing through, as if I were a traveler. I am a stranger to what is coming, to what is, as I am to those new boulevards, implacably straight, that no longer exude the world of Balzac, that conjure some American Babylon of the future. (Location 242)
Note: Especialement la phrase “un etranger…” etc
Chateaubriand felt apocalyptic intimations: “The time will come when the obelisk of the desert will once again know, in that place of murder, the silence and solitude of Luxor.” (Location 250)
no more than on the symbolic mountain where Hugo wants to make us think he sought inspiration, whereas he tells us plainly in Choses vues how he found his ideas by chance in the street. (Location 276)
It was a city composed of myriad small undertakings, momentary decisions, fluctuations of enthusiasm, accommodations to fortune, which accrued and weathered and developed a patina, and were built on top of and next to and around in an endless process of layering. Even now, the layout of streets in some parts of town derives from ancient and forgotten circumstances—some course of water or farmer’s field or half-whimsical decision made in the Middle Ages or even earlier—and over time this curve and that angle, having no evident logical sense, developed, as it were, personalities. (Location 299)
Until not so long ago it was always possible to find a place in the city. (Location 307)
Perhaps that remains an option, but it has been driven indoors, out of the social realm, (Location 311)
Note: Compare goncourt quote
the already ancient Rue Maître-Albert made to seem even more archaic in the nineteenth century by being renamed after the medieval alchemist Albertus Magnus, who once lived nearby. (Location 339)
