r to be wearing a grey glove--"look. That brute
turns the house upside down and knocks everything to pieces, and here's
the result. He leaves more dust when he goes than he found when he came
in!"

"Bah," said Des Hermies, "dust isn't a bad thing. Besides having the
taste of ancient biscuit and the smell of an old book, it is the
floating velvet which softens hard surfaces, the fine dry wash which
takes the garishness out of crude colour schemes. It is the caparison of
abandon, the veil of oblivion. Who, then, can despise it--aside from
certain persons whose lamentable lot must often have wrung a tear from
you?

"Imagine living in one of these Paris _passages_. Think of a consumptive
spitting blood and suffocating in a room one flight up, behind the
'ass-back' gables of, say the passage des Panoramas, for instance. When
the window is open the dust comes in impregnated with snuff and
saturated with clammy exudations. The invalid, choking, begs for air,
and in order that he may breathe the window is _closed_.

"Well, the dust that you complain of is rather milder than that. Anyway
I don't hear you coughing.... But if you're ready we'll be on our way."

"Where shall we go?" asked Durtal.

Des Hermies did not answer. They left the rue du Regard, in which Durtal
lived, and went down the rue du Cherche-Midi as far as the Croix-Rouge.

"Let's go on to the place Saint-Sulpice," said Des Hermies, and after a
silence he continued, "Speaking of dust, 'out of which we came and to
which we shall return,' do you know that after we are dead our corpses
are devoured by different kinds of worms according as we are fat or
thin? In fat corpses one species of maggot is found, the rhizophagus,
while thin corpses are patronized only by the phora. The latter is
evidently the aristocrat, the fastidious gourmet which turns up its nose
at a heavy meal of copious breasts and juicy fat bellies. Just think,
there is no perfect equality, even in the manner in which we feed the
worms.

"But this is where we stop."

They had come to where the rue Ferou opens into the place Saint-Sulpice.
Durtal looked up and on an unenclosed porch in the flank of the church
of Saint-Sulpice he read the placard, "Tower open to visitors."

"Let's go up," said Des Hermies.

"What for! In this weather?" and Durtal pointed at the yellow sky over
which black clouds, like factory smoke, were racing, so low that the tin
chimneys seemed to penetrate them and crenel