First Chapter, First Paragraph Tuesday Intros

Here I am back again in Bibliophile by the Sea's weekly meme "First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros". This week I'm sharing with you a part of "The Prague Cemetery" by Italian author Umberto Eco. Actually, this book caught my attention just because of its name. Prague is a city I liked so much that even its cemetery caught my attention :) After I checked the first page (not the cover writing but the first page), I decided to buy the book. I guess my decision is a bit biased as I love, love, love Paris no matter what.

Well, I'm reading the Turkish translation (I wish my Italian was good enough to read the original copy) but I'm gonna share with you the English translation by Richard Dixon.

1. A Passerby on that Gray Morning

A passerby on that gray morning in March 1897, crossing, at his own risk and peril, place Maubert, or the Maub, as it was known in criminal circles (formerly a center of university life in the Middle Ages, when students flocked there from the Faculty of Arts in Vicus Stramineus, or Rue du Fouarre, and later a place of execution for apostles of free thought such as Etienne Dolet), would have found himself in one of the few spots in Paris spared from Baron Haussmann's devastations, amid a tangle of malodorous alleys, sliced in two by the course of Biévre, which still emerged here, flowing out from the bowels of the metropolis, where it had long been confined, before emptying feverish, gasping and verminous into the nearby Seine. From place Maubert, already scarred by Boulevard Saint-Germain, a web of narrow lanes still branched off,  such as Rue Maitre-Albert, Rue Saint-Séverin, Rue Galande, Rue de la Bucherie, Rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, as far as Rue de la Huchette, littered with filthy hotels generally run by Auvergnat hoteliers of legendary cupidity, who demanded one franc for the first night and forty centimes thereafter (plus twenty sous if you wanted a sheet).