Rue d'Auseil

The Rue d'Auseil is a fictional street in an unnamed French city that is generally assumed to be Paris;An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, "The Music of Erich Zann", S. T. Joshi and David E. Schulz (Hippocampus Press, 1994): "The story appears to be set in Paris." it appears as the location of Erich Zann's apartment in H. P. Lovecraft's short story "The Music of Erich Zann".
Lovecraft's narrator describes the street as a "narrow, steep, and ancient street of steps and tottering houses":I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d’Auseil. It was almost a cliff, closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of flights of steps, and ending at the top in a lofty ivied wall. Its paving was irregular, sometimes stone slabs, sometimes cobblestones, and sometimes bare earth with struggling greenish-grey vegetation. The houses were tall, peaked-roofed, incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward, forward, and sidewise. Occasionally an opposite pair, both leaning forward, almost met across the street like an arch; and certainly they kept most of the light from the ground below. There were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the street.The street cannot be found on any map, but it "lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick blear-windowed warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone.... Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled streets with rails; and then came the ascent, at first gradual, but incredibly steep as the Rue d’Auseil was reached."
The inhabitants of the street at first seem "silent and reticent", and are "all very old".
Erich Zann lives in "the third house from the top of the street, and by far the tallest of them all"--a "tottering house" whose landlord was "the paralytic Blandot." Zann occupies a peaked garret on the sixth floor--whose "single gable window was the only point on the street from which one could look over the terminating wall at the declivity and panorama beyond."
After Zann's death and the narrator's escape from it, the street seems to vanish as if it had never existed. The narrator searches extensively, but is never able to locate it again, or to find anyone who's ever seen it.
==Behind the Mythos==
"Auseil" is not a word in French, but it has been suggested that Lovecraft derived it from the phrase "au seuil," meaning "at the threshold."An H. P. Lovecraft Encylopedia, "The Music of Erich Zann". Auseil is read like "oseille," meaning "sorrel" or, colloquially, "money".
==Other Writers==
Fred Chappell wrote a short story called "In the Rue d'Auseil", which appeared in Song of Cthulhu: Tales of the Spheres Beyond Sound (2001).
==Gallery==
RueDauseil.jpg|As depicted by Aldin Baroza
==References==
Category:Locations Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works
Category:Structures