on city planning and transcience (aragon)

The great American instinct, imported to our capital by a Second Empire prefect, has ruled the map of Paris into rectangles, making it impossible to maintain these human aquaria which, though already gutted of their original life, deserve a notice for the several modern myths they conceal—only now that the bulldozer threatens them have they become temples of a cult of the ephemeral, the ghostly landscape of forbidden pleasures and professions, incomprehensible yesterday and tomorrow gone.

- page 10, "Le Passage de L'Opera", Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon