philosophers should, and I feel sure your unavowed desire is to
conduct your old instructor thither, the master who initiated
you in the Latin rudiments."

They entered a drinking-shop perfumed with so strong a reek of
kirsch and absinthe as took Servien's breath away. The room was
long and narrow, while against the walls varnished barrels with
copper taps were ranged in a long-drawn perspective that was
lost in the thick haze of tobacco-smoke hanging in the air under
the gas-jets. At little tables of painted deal a number of men
were drinking; dressed in black and wearing tall silk hats,
broken-brimmed and shiny from exposure to the rain, they sat and
smoked in silence. Before the door of the stove several pairs
of thin legs were extended to catch the heat, and a thread of
steam curled up from the toes of the owners' boots. A heavy torpor
seemed to weigh upon all this assemblage of pallid, impassive
faces.

While Monsieur Tudesco was distributing hand-shakes to sundry old
acquaintances, Jean caught scraps of the conversation of those about
him that filled him with a despairing melancholy--school ushers
railing at the cookery of cheap eating-houses, tipplers maundering
contentedly to one another, enchanted at the profundity of their
own wisdom, schemers planning to make a fortune, politicians
arguing, amateurs of the fair sex telling highly-spiced anecdotes
of love and women--and amongst it all this sentence:

"The harmony of the spheres fills the spaces of infinity, and
if we hear it not, it is because, as Plato says, our ears are
stopped with earth."