And Crillon, in face of all this perversity, all this wrong-doing, smiles!  I like to see that happy smile of innocence on the lowly worker’s face.  He is better than I, and he even understands life better, with his unfailing good sense.

I say to him, “But are there not any bad customs and vices?  Alcoholism, for instance?”

“Yes,” says Crillon, “as long as you don’t exarrergate it.  I don’t like exarrergations, and I find as much of it among the pestimists as among the opticions.  Drink, you say!  It’s chiefly that folks haven’t enough charitableness, mind you.  They blame all these poor devils that drink and they think themselves clever!  And they’re envious, too; if they wasn’t that, tell me, would they stand there in stony peterified silence before the underhand goings-on of bigger folks?  That’s what it is, at bottom of us.  Let me tell you now.  I’ll say nothing against Termite, though he’s a poacher, and for the castle folks that’s worse than all, but if yon bandit of a Brisbille weren’t the anarchist he is and frightening everybody, I’d excuse him his dirty nose and even not taking it out of a pint pot all the week through.  It isn’t a crime, isn’t only being a good boozer.  We’ve got to look ahead and have a broad spirit, as Monsieur Joseph says.  Tolerantness!  We all want it, eh?”

“You’re a good sort,” I say.

“I’m a man, like everybody,” proudly replies Crillon.  “It’s not that I hold by accustomary ideas; I’m not an antiquitary, but I don’t like to single-arise myself.  If I’m a botcher in life, it’s cos I’m the same as others—­no less,” he says, straightening up.  And standing still more erect, he adds, “Nor no more, neither!”

When we are not chatting we read aloud.  There is a very fine library at the factory, selected by Madame Valentine Gozlan from works of an educational or moral kind, for the use of the staff.  Marie, whose imagination goes further afield than mine, and who has not my anxieties, directs the reading.  She opens a book and reads aloud while I take my ease, looking at the pastel portrait which hangs just opposite the window.  On the glass which entombs the picture I see the gently moving and puffing reflection of the fidgety window curtains, and the face of that glazed portrait becomes blurred with broken streaks and all kinds of wave marks.

“Ah, these adventures!” Marie sometimes sighs, at the end of a chapter; “these things that never happen!”

“Thank Heaven,” I cry.

“Alas,” she replies.

Even when people live together they differ more than they think!

At other times Marie reads to herself, quite silently.  I surprise her absorbed in this occupation.  It even happens that she applies herself thus to poetry.  In her set and stooping face her eyes come and go over the abbreviated lines of the verses.  From time to time she raises them and looks up at the sky, and—­vastly further than the visible sky—­at all that escapes from the little cage of words.