Sparsit sat at the window, with her hands before her, not thinking much of the sounds of evening; the whooping of boys, the barking of dogs, the rumbling of wheels, the steps and voices of passengers, the shrill
street cries, the clogs upon the pavement when it was their hour for going by, the shutting-up of shop-shutters.
Were the street cries elements of a "city as concert" or harsh, strident intrusions on an otherwise more peaceful bourgeois urban experience?
This distinction is explored in a subsequent chapter in which writings on glaziers (window makers who, in this instance, solicited their services through street cries) offering divergent representations of their activities are analyzed.
Yet this short scene, which stages Vautrin's relationship to the other main characters, relates to a long tradition of discourse on street cries dating back to the Middle Ages.
Street cries eventually become a metonym for the working class as a whole, now defined by raucousness and criminality as opposed to bourgeois silence and respectability.
In Balzac, as in the other ethnographers I will refer to, the discourse on street cries reveals the mixed perception of peddlers as both objects of mistrust and of nostalgia.
In a novel set between new and old upper class neighborhoods, the Chaussee d'Antin and the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the street cries episode is one of the few that focuses on the daily life of the lower class in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau.
It comes as little surprise then that the street cries dinner scene is described from the vantage point of a bourgeois.
The boarders' imitation of street cries here evidences more of the language games, especially "la plaisanterie de parler en rama," that they play on a regular basis at the pension.
From this outsider's position, the street cries coalesce into an opera and their charm becomes palpable.
The "veritable opera" of the Paris street cries, in fact, occurs within a series of references to music, which confirms the scene's central role in the novel's use of sounds.
There are vivid descriptions of the minutiae of history: the dog that "kept running at the side of his friend's horse throughout the entire battle of Junin"; the nineteenth-century
street cries of Mexico City; a glimpse of Flora Tristan contemplating the llama as the "only animal man has not debased."