creased continually; suicides
multiplied in the world of wealth, and many of them were accompanied
by atrocious and extraordinary circumstances, which bore witness to an
unheard o perversion of intelligence and sensibility.

Another fatal symptom created a strong impression upon average minds.
Terrible accidents, henceforth periodical and regular, entered
into people's calculations, and kept mounting higher and higher in
statistical tables. Every day, machines burst into fragments, houses
fell down, trains laden with merchandise fell on to the streets,
demolishing entire buildings and crushing hundreds of passers-by.
Through the ground, honey-combed with tunnels, two or three storeys of
work-shops would often crash, engulfing all those who worked in them.

S. 2

In the southwestern district of the city, on an eminence which had
preserved its ancient name of Fort Saint-Michel, there stretched a
square where some old trees still spread their exhausted arms above the
greensward. Landscape gardeners had constructed a cascade, grottos, a
torrent, a lake, and an island, on its northern slope. From this side
one could see the whole town with its streets, its boulevards, its
squares, the multitude of its roofs and domes, its air-passages, and its
crowds of men, covered with a veil of silence, and seemingly enchanted
by the distance. This square was the healthiest place in the capital;
here no smoke obscured the sky, and children were brought here to play.
In summer some employees from the neighbouring offices and laboratories
used to resort to it for a moment after their luncheons, but they did
not disturb its solitude and peace.

It was owing to this custom that, one day in June, about mid-day, a
telegraph clerk, Caroline Meslier, came and sat down on a bench at the
end of a terrace. In order to refresh her eyes by the sight of a little
green, she turned her back to the town. Dark, with brown eyes, robust
and placid, Caroline appeared to be from twenty-five to twenty-eight
years of age. Almost immediately, a clerk in the Electricity Trust,
George Clair, took his place beside her. Fair, thin, and supple, he had
features of a feminine delicacy; he was scarcely older than she, and
looked still younger. As they met almost every day in this place,
a comradeship had sprung up between them, and they enjoyed chatting
together. But their conversation had never been tender, affectionate, or
even intimate. Caroline, although it had h