riveted together in
fraternity. But there is less dissimilarity than at the beginning in
the appearance of the cave-men.

Papa Blaire displays in his well-worn mouth a set of new teeth, so
resplendent that one can see nothing in all his poor face except those
gayly-dight jaws. The great event of these foreign teeth's
establishment, which he is taming by degrees and sometimes uses for
eating, has profoundly modified his character and his manners. He is
rarely besmeared with grime, he is hardly slovenly. Now that he has
become handsome he feels it necessary to become elegant. For the moment
he is dejected, because--a miracle--he cannot wash himself. Deeply sunk
in a corner, he half opens a lack-luster eye, bites and masticates his
old soldier's mustache--not long ago the only ornament on his face--and
from time to time spits out a hair.

Fouillade is shivering, cold-smitten, or yawns, depressed and shabby.
Marthereau has not changed at all. He is still as always well-bearded,
his eye round and blue, and his legs so short that his trousers seem to
be slipping continually from his waist and dropping to his feet. Cocon
is always Cocon by the dried and parchment-like head wherein sums are
working; but a recurrence of lice, the ravages of which we see
overflowing on to his neck and wrists, has isolated him for a week now
in protracted tussles which leave him surly when he returns among us.
Paradis retains unimpaired the same quantum of good color and good
temper; he is unchanging, perennial. We smile when he appears in the
distance, placarded on the background of sandbags like a new poster.
Nothing has changed in Pepin either, whom we can just see taking a
stroll--we can tell him behind by his red-and-white squares of an
oilcloth draught-board, and in front by his blade-like face and the
gleam of a knife in his cold gray look. Nor has Volpatte changed, with
his leggings, his shouldered blanket, and his face of a Mongolian
tatooed with dirt; nor Tirette, although he has been worried for some
time by blood-red streaks in his eyes--for some unknown and mysterious
reason. Farfadet keeps himself aloof, in pensive expectation. When the
post is being given out he awakes from his reverie to go so far, and
then retires into himself. His clerkly hands indite numerous and
careful postcards. He does not know of Eudoxie's end. Lamuse said no
more to any one of the ultimate and awful embrace in which he clasped
her body. He regretted--I