La Rue Laferrière – Jules Romains, Translated from French by Stephan Crown-Weber

March 2, 2026

She seems self-devoted: a curve like the forms that stoke love, like an arm inspecting a mass before squeezing. None of the city’s motion pierces all the way through, but a multitude reaches her and fills her chinks, the walls lining her practically appearing to pivot to slow passing bodies, to draw them closer and rub them and pull them through a doorway. She opens coyly onto a busy route with exchanges hardly in evidence, warm toward some men, though one senses her selectiveness. Sometimes she sends out women, like a discouraging, painted breath. A little jostled, they insert themselves between vectors. Drawn to the center of town, the crowd heading downhill is unfazed. An individual lady climbing this street is pushed back and fights to avoid giving in to the reassurance of losing altitude like them. In reaction, the crowd thwarts these beautiful, cast-aside steps. Then this street notices the other street, the solitary sidewalks, the paving stones smiling like clean teeth; the lampposts standing and waiting like girls. She, the street, would like to disperse into unfathomable houses, and be nothing more than couples nestled behind pretty, milky, and wrinkled curtains feminizing the daylight hours with the lace skirts put on them.

This is how the rue Laferrière gives the crowd about a thirst for death. She resembles nothingness—alive only at certain hours when faces approach the windows or at night, when a posse leaving a theater vaporize their mirth in her like a bottle of perfume.

But the rue is especially real in the thoughts of other streets, and in their dim desire to resemble her. Isn’t she a quiet stationary route, who could exist, who prefers not to live all at once in order to feel a sounder ecstasy, better acquainted with joy than those traveled by trucks?