ces the porch, women are waiting, like a curtain of shadow,
which yields glimpses of their pale and expressionless faces. With nod
or word we recognize each other from the mass. Couples are formed by
the quick hooking of arms. All along the ghostly avenue one's eyes
follow the toilers' scrambling flight.

The avenue is a wan track cut across the open fields. Its course is
marked afar by lines of puny trees, sooty as snuffed candles; by
telegraph posts and their long spider-webs; by bushes or by fences,
which are like the skeletons of bushes. There are a few houses. Up
yonder a strip of sky still shows palely yellow above the meager suburb
where creeps the muddy crowd detached from the factory. The west wind
sets quivering their overalls, blue or black or khaki, excites the
woolly tails that flutter from muffled necks, scatters some evil odors,
attacks the sightless faces so deep-drowned beneath the sky.

There are taverns anon which catch the eye. Their doors are closed,
but their windows and fanlights shine like gold. Between the taverns
rise the fronts of some old houses, tenantless and hollow; others, in
ruins, cut into this gloomy valley of the homes of men with notches of
sky. The iron-shod feet all around me on the hard road sound like the
heavy rolling of drums, and then on the paved footpath like dragged
chains. It is in vain that I walk with head bent--my own footsteps are
lost in the rest, and I cannot hear them.

We hurry, as we do every evening. At that spot in the inky landscape
where a tall and twisted tree seems to writhe as if it had a soul, we
begin suddenly to descend, our feet plunging forward. Down below we
see the lights of Viviers sparkle. These men, whose day is worn out,
stride towards those earthly stars. One hope is like another in the
evening, as one weariness is like another; we are all alike. I, also.
I go towards my light, like all the others, as on every evening.

* * * * * *

When we have descended for a long time the gradient ends, the avenue
flattens out like a river, and widens as it pierces the town. Through
the latticed boughs of the old plane trees--still naked on this last
day of March--one glimpses the workmen's houses, upright in space, hazy
and fantastic chessboards, with squares of light dabbed on in places,
or like vertical cliffs in which our swarming is absorbed. Scattering
among the twilight colonnade of the trees, th