s
and got into the lungs. People stood in the doorways of their houses to
try and get a breath of air.

The windows of the steam-tram were open and the curtains fluttered in
the wind. There were very few passengers 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.