Not far from these groups, which are divided from the rest by a scarlet barrier of beaters and the flashing chain of their slung horns, arises Monsieur Fontan.  The huge merchant and cafe-owner occupies an intermediate and isolated place between principals and people.  His face is disposed in fat white tiers, like a Buddha’s belly.  Monumentally motionless he says nothing at all, but he tranquilly spits all around him.  He radiates saliva.

And for this ceremony, which seems like an apotheosis, all the notables of our quarter are gathered together, as well as those of the other quarter, who seem different and are similar.

We elbow the ordinary types.  Apolline goes crabwise.  She is in new things, and has sprinkled Eau-de-Cologne on her skin; her eye is bright; her face well-polished; her ears richly adorned.  She is always rather dirty, and her wrists might be branches, but she has cotton gloves.  There are some shadows in the picture, for Brisbille has come with his crony, Termite, so that his offensive and untidy presence may be a protest.  There is another blot—­a working man’s wife, who speaks at their meetings; people point at her.  “What’s that woman doing here?”

“She doesn’t believe in God,” says some one.

“Ah,” says a mother standing by, “that’s because she has no children.”

“Yes, she’s got two.”

“Then,” says the poor woman, “it’s because they’ve never been ill.”

Here is little Antoinette and the old priest is holding her hand.  She must be fifteen or sixteen years old by now, and she has not grown—­or, at least, one has not noticed it.  Father Piot, always white, gentle and murmurous, has shrunk a little; more and more he leans towards the tomb.  Both of them proceed in tiny steps.

“They’re going to cure her, it seems.  They’re seeing to it seriously.”

“Yes—­the extraordinary secret remedy they say they’re going to try.”

“No, it’s not that now.  It’s the new doctor who’s come to live here, and he says, they say, that he’s going to see about it.”

“Poor little angel!”

The almost blind child, whose Christian name alone one knows, and whose health is the object of so much solicitude, goes stiffly by, as if she were dumb also, and deaf to all the prayers that go on with her.

After the service some one comes forward and begins to speak.  He is an old man, an officer of the Legion of Honor; his voice is weak but his face noble.

He speaks of the Dead, whose day this is.  He explains to us that we are not separated from them; not only by reason of the future life and our sacred creeds, but because our life on earth must be purely and simply a continuation of theirs.  We must do as they did, and believe what they believed, else shall we fall into error and utopianism.  We are all linked to each other and with the past; we are bound together by an entirety of traditions and precepts.  Our normal destiny, so adequate to our nature, must be allowed to fulfill itself along the indicated path, without hearkening to the temptations of novelty, of hate, of envy—­of envy above all, that social cancer, that enemy of the great civic virtue—­Discipline.