The windows of the steam-tram were down, and the curtains fluttered in the wind, and there were very few passengers inside, because on such warm days people preferred the top or the platforms. Those few consisted of stout women in strange toilets, of those shopkeepers' wives from the suburbs, who made up for the distinguished looks which they did not possess, by ill-timed dignity; of gentlemen who were tired of the office, with yellow-faces, who stooped rather, and with one shoulder higher than the other, in consequence of their long hours of work bending over the desk. Their uneasy and melancholy faces also spoke of domestic troubles, of constant want of money, of former hopes, that had been finally disappointed; for they all belonged to that army of poor, threadbare devils who vegetate economically in mean, plastered houses, with a tiny piece of neglected garden in the midst of those fields where night soil is deposited, which are on the outskirts of Paris. A short, fat man, with a puffy face and a big stomach, dressed all in black, and wearing a decoration in his button-hole, was talking to a tall, thin man, dressed in a dirty, white linen suit, that was all unbuttoned, with a white Panama hat on. The former spoke so slowly and hesitatingly, that it occasionally almost seemed as if he stammered; he was Monsieur Caravan, chief clerk in the Admiralty. The other, who had formerly been surgeon on board a merchant ship, had set up in practice in Courbevoie, where he applied the vague remnants of medical knowledge which he had retained after an adventurous life, to the wretched population of that district. His name was Chenet, and strange rumors were current as to his morality. Monsieur Caravan had always led the normal life of a man in a Government office. For the last thirty years he had invariably gone the same way to his office every morning, and had met the same men going to business at the same time and nearly on the same spot, and he returned home every evening the same way, and again met the same faces which he had seen growing old. Every morning, after buying his halfpenny paper at the corner of the _Faubourg Saint Honore_, he bought his two rolls, and then he went into his office, like a culprit who is giving himself up to justice, and he got to his desk as quickly as possible, always feeling uneasy, as he was expecting a rebuke for some neglect of duty of which he might have been guilty.