Gambara by Honoré de Balzac

As soon as the shops were lighted up and the dusk seemed to him black enough, he went out into the square in front of the Palais Royal, but as a man anxious not to be recognized; for he kept close under the houses as far as the fountain, screened by the hackney cab stand, till he reached the Rue Froid Manteau, a dirty, poky, disreputable street a sort of sewer tolerated by the police close to the purified purlieus of the Palais Royal, as an Italian major domo allows a careless servant to leave the sweepings of the rooms in a corner of the staircase.