Among the public, the enjoyment of a fine spectacle, the pleasure of turning a week-day into a Sunday, dominated every other sentiment.  Along the line of the boulevards, the spectators on the balconies almost seemed disposed to applaud; here, in the populous districts, irreverence was still more frankly manifest.  Jests, blackguardly wit at the expense of the dead man and his doings, known to all Paris, laughter raised by the tall hats of the rabbis, the pass-word of the council experts, all were heard in the air between two rolls of the drum.  Poverty, forced labour, with its feet in the wet, wearing its blouse, its apron, its cap raised from habit, with sneering chuckle watched this inhabitant of another sphere pass by, this brilliant duke, severed now from all his honours, who perhaps while living had never paid a visit to that end of the town.  But there it is.  To arrive up yonder, where everybody has to go, the common route must be taken, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the Rue de la Roquette as far as that great gate where the octroi is collected and the infinite begins.  And well! it does one good to see that lordly persons like Mora, dukes, ministers, follow the same road towards the same destination.  This equality in death consoles for many of the injustices of life.  To-morrow bread will seem less dear, wine better, the workman’s tool less heavy, when he will be able to say to himself as he rises in the morning, “That old Mora, he has come to it like the rest!”

The procession still went on, more fatiguing even than lugubrious.  Now it consisted of choral societies, deputations from the army and the navy, officers of all descriptions, pressing on in a troop in advance of a long file of empty vehicles—­mourning-coaches, private carriages—­present for reasons of etiquette.  Then the troops followed in their turn, and into the sordid suburb, that long Rue de la Roquette, already swarming with people as far as eye could reach, there plunged a whole army, foot-soldiers, dragoons, lancers, carabineers, heavy guns with their great mouths in the air, ready to bark, making pavement and windows tremble, but not able to drown the rolling of the drums—­a sinister and savage rolling which suggested to Felicia’s imagination some funeral of an African chief, at which thousands of sacrificed victims accompany the soul of a prince so that it shall not pass alone into the kingdom of spirits, and made her fancy that perhaps this pompous and interminable retinue was about to descend and disappear in the superhuman grave large enough to receive the whole of it.

“Now and in the hour of our death.  Amen,” Crenmitz murmured, while the cab swayed from side to side in the lighted square, and high in space the golden statue of Liberty seemed to be taking a magic flight; and the old dancer’s prayer was perhaps the one note of sincere feeling called forth on the immense line of the funeral procession.