ese people engulf
themselves in the heaped-up lodgings and rooms; they flow together in
the cavity of doors; they plunge into the houses; and there they are
vaguely turned into lights.

I continue to walk, surrounded by several companions who are foremen
and clerks, for I do not associate with the workmen. Then there are
handshakes, and I go on alone.

Some dimly seen wayfarers disappear; the sounds of sliding locks and
closing shutters are heard here and there; the houses have shut
themselves up, the night-bound town becomes a desert profound. I can
hear nothing now but my own footfall.

Viviers is divided into two parts--like many towns, no doubt. First,
the rich town, composed of the main street, where you find the Grand
Cafe, the elegant hotels, the sculptured houses, the church and the
castle on the hill-top. The other is the lower town, which I am now
entering. It is a system of streets reached by an extension of that
avenue which is flanked by the workmen's barracks and climbs to the
level of the factory. Such is the way which it has been my custom to
climb in the morning and to descend when the light is done, during the
six years of my clerkship with Messrs. Gozlan & Co. In this quarter I
am still rooted. Some day I should like to live yonder; but between
the two halves of the town there is a division--a sort of frontier,
which has always been and will always be.

In the Rue Verte I meet only a street lamp, and then a mouse-like
little girl who emerges from the shadows and enters them again without
seeing me, so intent is she on pressing to her heart, like a doll, the
big loaf they have sent her to buy. Here is the Rue de l'Etape, my
street. Through the semi-darkness, a luminous movement peoples the
hairdresser's shop, and takes shape on the dull screen of his window.
His transparent door, with its arched inscription, opens just as I
pass, and under the soap-dish,[1] whose jingle summons customers,
Monsieur Justin Pocard himself appears, along with a rich gust of
scented light. He is seeing a customer out, and improving the occasion
by the utterance of certain sentiments; and I had time to see that the
customer, convinced, nodded assent, and that Monsieur Pocard, the
oracle, was caressing his white and ever-new beard with his luminous
hand.

[Footnote 1: The hanging sign of a French barber.--Tr.]

I turn round the cracked walls of the former tinplate works, now bowed
and crumbling, whose windo