drop by drop, and coming over the tiled floor. After long weeks of
intense cold, dark dampness rained quivering over all. And there, lacking
even a chair, even a plank, Laveuve lay in a corner on a little pile of
filthy rags spread upon the bare tiles; he looked like some animal dying
on a dung-heap.

"There!" said Celine in her sing-song voice, "there he is, that's the
Philosopher!"

Madame Theodore had bent down to ascertain if he still lived. "Yes, he
breathes; he's sleeping I think. Oh! if he only had something to eat
every day, he would be well enough. But what would you have? He has
nobody left him, and when one gets to seventy the best is to throw
oneself into the river. In the house-painting line it often happens that
a man has to give up working on ladders and scaffoldings at fifty. He at
first found some work to do on the ground level. Then he was lucky enough
to get a job as night watchman. But that's over, he's been turned away
from everywhere, and, for two months now, he's been lying in this nook
waiting to die. The landlord hasn't dared to fling him into the street as
yet, though not for want of any inclination that way. We others sometimes
bring him a little wine and a crust, of course; but when one has nothing
oneself, how can one give to others?"

Pierre, terrified, gazed at that frightful remnant of humanity, that
remnant into which fifty years of toil, misery and social injustice had
turned a man. And he ended by distinguishing Laveuve's white, worn,
sunken, deformed head. Here, on a human face, appeared all the ruin
following upon hopeless labour. Laveuve's unkempt beard straggled over
his features, suggesting an old horse that is no longer cropped; his
toothless jaws were quite askew, his eyes were vitreous, and his nose