assengers inside, because on warm days people
preferred the outside or the platforms. They consisted of stout women in
peculiar costumes, of those shopkeepers' wives from the suburbs, who made
up for the distinguished looks which they did not possess by ill-assumed
dignity; of men tired from office-work, with yellow faces, stooped
shoulders, and with one shoulder higher than the other, in consequence
of, their long hours of writing at a desk. Their uneasy and melancholy
faces also spoke of domestic troubles, of constant want of money,
disappointed hopes, for they all belonged to the army of poor, threadbare
devils who vegetate economically in cheap, plastered houses with a tiny
piece of neglected garden on the outskirts of Paris, in the midst of
those fields where night soil is deposited.

A short, corpulent man, with a puffy face, dressed all in black and
wearing a decoration in his buttonhole, was talking to a tall, thin man,
dressed in a dirty, white linen suit, the coat all unbuttoned, with a
white Panama hat on his head. The former spoke so slowly and hesitatingly
that it occasionally almost seemed as if he stammered; he was Monsieur
Caravan, chief clerk in the Admiralty. The other, who had formerly been
surgeon on board a merchant ship, had set up in practice in Courbevoie,
where he applied the vague remnants of medical knowledge which he had
retained after an adventurous life, to the wretched population of that
district. His name was Chenet, and strange rumors were current as to his
morality.

Monsieur Caravan had always led the normal life of a man in a Government
office. For the last thirty years he had invariably gone the same way to
his office every morning, and had met the same men going to business at
the same time, and nearly on the same spot, and he returned home every
evening by the same road, and again met the same faces which he had seen
growing old. Every morning, after buying his penny paper at the corner of
the Faubourg Saint Honore, he bought two rolls, and then went to his
office, like a culprit who is giving himself up to justice, and got to
his desk as quickly as possible, always feeling uneasy; as though he were
expecting a rebuke for some neglect of duty of which he might have been
guilty.

Nothing had ever occurred to change the monotonous order of his
existence, for no event affected him except the work of his office,
perquisites, gratuities, and promotion. He never spoke of anything but o