The small engine attached to the Neuilly steam-tram whistled as it passed the Porte
Maillot to warn all obstacles to get out of its way and puffed like a person out of breath as
it sent out its steam, its pistons moving rapidly with a noise as of iron legs running. The
train was going along the broad avenue that ends at the Seine. The sultry heat at the close
of a July day lay over the whole city, and from the road, although there was not a breath
of wind stirring, there arose a white, chalky, suffocating, warm dust, which adhered to the
moist skin, filled the eyes 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.
Nothing had ever occurred to change the monotonous order of his existence, for no event
affected him except the work of his office, perquisites, gratuities, and promotion. He
