belief that men are ashamed of the good they do, and that they conceal
themselves when performing acts of devotion and generosity. Don't you
think that is so?"

"As far as I am concerned," replied the chronicler of the morning paper,
"every time I have opened a door by mistake--I mean this both literally
and metaphorically--I have always come across some unsuspected baseness.
Were society suddenly turned inside out like a glove, so that one could
see the inside, we should all faint away with horror and disgust."

"Some time ago," said Roger to the painter Michel, "I used to know
Chevalier's uncle on the Butte de Montmartre. He was a photographer who
dressed like an astrologer. A crazy old fellow, always sending one
customer the portrait of another. The customers used to complain. But
not all of them. There were even some who thought the portraits were a
good likeness."

"What has become of him?"

"He went bankrupt and hanged himself."

In the Boulevard Saint-Michel Pradel, who was walking beside Trublet,
was still profiting by the opportunity of obtaining information as to
the immortality of the soul and the fate of man after death. He obtained
nothing that seemed to him sufficiently positive and repeated:

"I should like to know."

To which Dr. Socrates replied:

"Men were not made to know; men were not made to understand. They do not
possess the necessary faculties. A man's brain is larger and richer in
convolutions than that of a gorilla, but there is no essential
difference between the two. Our highest thoughts and our most
comprehensive systems will never be anything more than the magnificent
extension of the ideas contained in the head of a monkey. We know more
about the world than the dog does, and this flatters and entertains us;
but it is very little in itself, and our illusions increase with our
knowledge."

But Pradel was not listening. He was mentally rehearsing the speech
which he had to deliver at Chevalier's grave.

When the funeral procession turned towards the shabby grass-plots which
overflow the Avenue de l'Observatoire, the tram-cars, out of respect for
the dead, made way for it.

Trublet remarked upon this.

"Men," he said, "respect death, since they rightly believe that, if it
is respectable to die, every one is assured of being respectable in
that, at least."

The actors were excitedly discussing Chevalier's death. Durville,
mysteriously, and in a deep voice, disclosed the tragedy