ack, and beg him to stay a little longer, so much did he dread
the time when the waiter should come up to him and say sharply: "Come,
monsieur, it is closing time!"

He thus got into the habit of going to the beer houses, where the
continual elbowing of the drinkers brings you in contact with a
familiar and silent public, where the heavy clouds of tobacco smoke lull
disquietude, while the heavy beer dulls the mind and calms the heart.
He almost lived there. He was scarcely up before he went there to find
people to distract his glances and his thoughts, and soon, as he felt
too lazy to move, he took his meals there.

After every meal, during more than an hour, he sipped three or four
small glasses of brandy, which stupefied him by degrees, and then his
head drooped on his chest, he shut his eyes, and went to sleep. Then,
awaking, he raised himself on the red velvet seat, straightened his
waistcoat, pulled down his cuffs, and took up the newspapers again,
though he had already seen them in the morning, and read them all
through again, from beginning to end. Between four and five o'clock he
went for a walk on the boulevards, to get a little fresh air, as he used
to say, and then came back to the seat which had been reserved for him,
and asked for his absinthe. He would talk to the regular customers
whose acquaintance he had made. They discussed the news of the day and
political events, and that carried him on till dinner time; and he spent
the evening as he had the afternoon, until it was time to close. That
was a terrible moment for him when he was obliged to go out into the
dark, into his empty room full of dreadful recollections, of horrible
thoughts, and of mental agony. He no longer saw any of his old friends,
none of his relatives, nobody who might remind him of his past life. But
as his apartments were a hell to him, he took a room in a large hotel,
a good room on the ground floor, so as to see the passers-by. He was no
longer alone in that great building. He felt people swarming round him,
he heard voices in the adjoining rooms, and when his former sufferings
tormented him too much at the sight of his bed, which was turned down,
and of his solitary fireplace, he went out into the wide passages and
walked up and down them like a sentinel, before all the closed doors,
and looked sadly at the shoes standing in couples outside them, women's
little boots by the side of men's thick ones, and he thought that, no
doubt, a