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It was in the vicinity of a midday July. The sun had engraved itself with a fiery needle
on the many-breasted horizon. The asphalt was quivering softly, exhaling that tender,
tarry odour that gives the carcinomous ideas at once puerile and corrosive about the
origin of their malady. A bus in green and white livery, emblazoned with an
enigmatic S, came to gather from the neighbourhood of the Parc Monceau a small and
favoured batch of postulant-passengers into the moist confines of sudiferous
dissolution. On the back platform of this masterpiece of the contemporary French
automobile industry, where itinerants were packed together like sardines in a tin, an
incorrigible rascal who was slowly advancing towards the commencement of his
fourth decade and who was carrying between a neck of almost serpentine length and a
hat encircled by a cordelet a head as insipid as it was leaden raised his voice to
complain with an unfeigned bitterness which seemed to emnate from a glass of
gentrian-bitters, or from any other liquid of similar properties, of a phenomenon of
the nature of a recurring blow or shock which in his opinion had its origin in a hic et
nunc present co-user of the P.P.T.B. In order to give utterance to his lament he
adopted the acid tones of a venerable vidame who gets his hindquarters pinched in a
public privy and who strange to state does not at all approve of this compliment and
is not at all that way inclined.
Later, when the sun had already descended by several degrees the monumental
stairway of its celestial parade and when I was once more causing myself to be
conveyed by another bus of the same line, I perceived the individual described above
displacing himself in a peripatetic fashion in the Cour de Rome in the company of an
individual ejusdem farinae who was giving him, in this locality dedicated to automobilistic circulation, sartorial advice which hung by the thread ofa button.