On a closer view, there is about them something that sets them all into a class apart: a lack of physical vitality, a sickly look about the body, too much flesh or too little, eyes blazing with fever, sometimes an obvious infirmity, more often a wan skin faintly coloured with very poor blood. Never a joyous relaxation of healthy muscles: all of them have the slow, dragging movement of the snail. Finding themselves herded together an unendurable thought, some have started a conversation to satisfy their pride; others are silent, too proud to talk. There are wage-earners there, professional men, and long-haired intellectuals whose bitter looks are veiled by spectacles. Everybody smokes. Never has it been so clear that tobacco is an anodyne for soul sickness. From time to time, two or three men reach the garden gate and disappear for a few minutes. They return wiping their mouths, their breath reeking with wine. Every few minutes the door opens. A gendarme appears and calls out some names. Those who are called push their way through the crowd, as if drawn by threads. Their mouths twitch a little at the corners. They affect a detached, bored, or chaffing expression, and they vanish under the arch. They no longer see the February sky; no longer do they breathe the cold odorous wind: they are pushed one against the other into a filthy corridor, from the walls of which--painted Heaven knows how!--oozes a thick, slimy sweat. They remain there herded for some time, until another door opens. A gendarme counts them off by the dozen, like fruit or cattle, and hustles them into a large hall where the Thing is to take place.... At once a sickening smell of man makes them gasp. They cannot at first see very clearly what all the movement going on there is about. But they are left no time to think. What indeed is the good of thinking at a time when an immense lamenting cry escapes from the entire stricken nation--a desperate call, the death-rattle of a drowning people? Why think? Does that frenzied, roaring whirlwind which lays waste the old continent, does _that_ think? No, it is not indeed the time for thought. The men have to undress quickly and fall in--in rows. The hall is huge and forbidding. Its walls are decorated with texts, and there are busts of unknown men; in the centre a table, as at a tribunal. Some big-wig, white-haired and rather arrogant, is enthroned there; he seems exhausted, but pertinacious. He is assisted by some obscure supernumeraries. In front of the table, two doctors in white overalls--one old and wizened, the other still young, with a preoccupied, listless look. The men advance in single files towards each of the doctors in white: they march one behind the other like suppliants proceeding to the altar of an angered God. They do not know what to do with their arms.