He did not know Paris any more than a blind man could know it, led by his dog, every day, under the same door: and if he read in his halfpenny paper of events and scandals, he saw them as fantastic tales invented at will to amuse petty clerks. An orderly man, a reactionary with no fixed party, but an enemy to ‘novelty’, he passed over the political events which his newspaper, for that matter, always misrepresented in the paid interests of a cause; and when he walked every evening up the Avenue of the Champs-Élysées, he considered the swelling mob of pedestrians and the rolling tide of vehicles in the fashion of a traveller far from home, who might be crossing distant countries.

Having completed, this very year, his thirty years of obligatory service, he had been given on the first of January, the Cross of the Legion of Honour, which is the reward, in these administrations under military rule, for the long years of wretched servitude (they are referred to as loyal services) of those sad convicts riveted to the green portfolio. This unexpected dignity, giving him a new and high idea of his capacity, had changed his way of life completely. He had since then suppressed his coloured trousers, and his gay-coloured vests, worn black trousers and long frock-coats on which his ribbon, very wide, looked better: and, shaven every morning, scrubbing his nails more carefully, changing his linen every two days through a legitimate feeling of propriety and of respect for the national order of which he made a part, he had become, in the space of a night, another Caravan, cleansed, majestic, and condescending.

In his own house, he would say ‘my cross’ on every occasion. Such pride took possession of him that he could not even endure in any one else’s buttonhole any ribbon of any sort. He was above all exasperated at the sight of foreign orders, ‘which should not be permitted to be worn in France’, and he was particularly angry with Dr. Chenet, whom he found every evening in the tramcar, adorned with some sort of a decoration, white, blue, orange, or green.

The conversation of the two men, from the Arc de Triomphe to Neuilly, was, for that matter, always the same: and this day, as on preceding days, they busied themselves first with different local abuses which shocked them both, the Mayor of Neuilly taking it at his ease. Then, as infallibly happened in company of a doctor, Caravan introduced the subject of diseases, hoping in this way to glean some little free bits of advice, or even a formal opinion, if he went about it properly, without letting him see the string on the bait. His mother, for that matter, had been worrying him for some time. She had frequent, prolonged, fainting fits, and although ninety years old, she would not consent to look after herself.

Her great age made Caravan affectionate, and he repeated ceaselessly to Dr. Chenet: ‘Do you see many get as far as that?’ And he rubbed his hands with pleasure, not because he was greatly concerned perhaps in seeing the good woman live eternally on the earth, but because the long duration of the maternal life was like a promise for himself.

He continued: ‘Oh, in my family, we go far. And so I am sure, that apart from accidents, I myself will die very old’. The medical practitioner threw him a pitying look: he considered a second time the reddish face of his neighbour, his greasy neck, his belly falling between his two flabby fat legs, all the apoplectic roundness of an enervated clerk: and, raising with a sweep of his hand his greyish panama hat, he answered sneeringly: ‘Not so sure as that, my boy. Your mother is a wizened runt, and you are only a fat mass of flesh’.

Caravan was disturbed and said nothing.

But the tramcar arrived at the station. The two companions got out, and Monsieur Chenet offered a vermouth at the Globe Café, opposite, where both of them were accustomed to go. The proprietor, a friend of theirs, stretched two fingers out to them, which they pressed over the bottles on the counter: and they went to join three domino players who had been sitting there since midday. Cordial words were exchanged, with the inevitable ‘What news?’ Then the players went on with their game: then they wished them good night. They put out their hands without raising their heads, and each went in to dinner.

Caravan inhabited, near the Rond-Point of Courbevoie, a little house of two stories, whose ground floor was occupied by a barber.