“Yes, sir; at your service, sir!” He lights a cigarette and begins to wheeze, as you may have noticed, from the effects of alcohol on his chest. At this juncture an officer comes in. M. Poisson exclaims: “It’s you, Perrin? Oh, my dear fellow, let me alone, will you, to get on with this job! You see I am tired out with the work. Just look at my list: nineteen! I’ll never get to the end! Nineteen!” The officer takes me by the arm and says: “Oh! but this is the extra man that has been sent to us.” Then M. Poisson comes nearer, looks at me closely, and bellows, his breath reeking with alcohol: “Send him to the mortuary! Some one is wanted there. He can help Tanquerelle. To the mortuary! And no more nonsense!” Ten minutes later I am stationed at the mortuary. * * * * * I became, sir, very wretched. I am fairly cheerful as a rule, but moving corpses about all day long cannot be called life. And such dead! The flower of the country, degraded to a depth which imagination cannot fathom. Tanquerelle is an old butcher’s assistant. He too drinks. He is always given the most unpleasant work because he drinks, and his unpleasant work is an excuse for giving him more drinks. But I am not going to expatiate on that. The drink question is not my business, unfortunately. Tanquerelle is no company: he is a calamity, a scourge, a breed apart, so to speak. When he is hungry, he never speaks; but he never is hungry. Usually he indulges in small talk--the comments of a drunkard, painful to hear in the presence of these corpses. We are told, sir, that dead bodies mean very little to one after a time, and that when you habitually live with them they become nothing more than stones to you. Well, that’s not my experience. Every one of these corpses, with which I pass my days, ends in being a companion to me. I get to like some of them, and I am almost sorry to see them taken away. Sometimes, when I carelessly hit up against them with my elbow, it is with an effort that I do not say, “I beg your pardon, my friend.” I look at them, with their blistered hands, and their feet covered with corns after long trudging over the roads, and my heart understands and is touched.