It does not take long to go through cities of this kind, and to know
their most intimate recesses, and sometimes one stumbles across places
that stay one's steps and fill one's heart with gladness.
Small cities, like small apartments, seem warmer and cosier to live in.
But keep this illusion! There are more draughts in such apartments than
in a palace, and a city of this kind is more deadly monotonous than the
desert.
Returning to the hotel by one of those paths we dearly love, that rises
and falls and winds, sometimes through a field, sometimes through grass
and brambles, sometimes along a wall, which are filled in turn with
daisies, pebbles and thistles, a path made for light thoughts and
bantering conversation,--returning, I said, to the city, we heard cries
and plaintive wails issue from under the slated roof of a square
building. It was the slaughter-house.
At that moment I thought of some terrible city, of some frightful and
immense place like Babylon or Babel, filled with cannibals and
slaughter-houses, where they butchered men instead of animals; and I
tried to discover a likeness to human agonies in those bleating and
sobbing voices.
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