* * * * * *

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, these 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 windows are felted with grime or broken into black stars.  A few steps farther I think I saw the childish shadow of little Antoinette, whose bad eyes they don’t seem to be curing; but not being certain enough to go and find her I turn into my court, as I do every evening.