“Our houses are already falling, neighbour,” said Baudu with a sombre air. “We shall all be crushed under them.” CHAPTER VIII. At this time the whole neighbourhood was talking of the great thoroughfare to be opened from the Bourse to the new Opera House, under the name of the Rue du Dix-Décembre. The expropriation judgments had just been delivered, two gangs of demolishers were already attacking the opening at the two ends, the first pulling down the old mansions in the Rue Louis-le-Grand, the other destroying the thin walls of the old Vaudeville; and one could hear the picks getting closer. The Rue de Choiseul and the Rue de la Michodière got quite excited over their condemned houses. Before a fortnight passed, the opening would make a great hole in these streets, letting in the sun and air. But what stirred up the district still more, was the work going on at The Ladies' Paradise. Considerable enlargements were talked of, gigantic shops having frontages in the Rue de la Michodière, the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin, and the Rue Monsigny. Mouret, it was said, had made arrangements with Baron Hartmann, chairman of the Crédit Immobilier, and he would occupy the whole block, except the future frontage in the Rue du Dix-Décembre, on which the baron wished to construct a rival to the Grand Hôtel. The Paradise people were buying up leases on all sides, the shops were closing, the tenants moving; and in the empty buildings an army of workmen were commencing the various alterations under a cloud of plaster. In the midst of this disorder, old Bourras's narrow hovel was the only one that remained standing and intact, obstinately sticking between the high walls covered with masons. When, the next day, Denise went with Pépé to her uncle Baudu's, the street was just at that moment blocked up by a line of tumbrels discharging bricks before the Hôtel Duvillard. Baudu was standing at his shop door looking on with a gloomy air. As The Ladies' Paradise became larger, The Old Elbeuf seemed to get smaller. The young girl thought the windows looked blacker than ever, and more and more crushed beneath the low first storey, with its prison-like bars; the damp had still further discoloured the old green sign-board, a sort of distress oozed from the whole frontage, livid in hue, and, as it were, grown thinner. “Here you are, then!” said Baudu. “Take care! they would run right over you.”