These are simple people, practising economies, and they do not change their face or even have it cleaned. It'll do fine, they insist, and who is to prove them wrong? The question, of course, since they have several faces, is what they do with the others. They keep them for best: their children can wear them some day. But it has been known for their dogs to go out wearing them, too. And why not? A face is a face.

Other people are disconcertingly quick to change their faces, one after another, and they wear them out. At first they suppose they have enough to last for ever, but hardly have they reached forty when they come to the last of them. There is of course a tragic side to this. They are not used to looking after their faces; the last is worn out in a week, holed and paper-thin in numerous places, and little by little the underlay shows through, the non-face, and they go about wearing that.

But that woman, that woman: she was wholly immersed within herself, bowed forward, head in hands. It was at the corner of the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. The moment I saw her, I began to tread softly. The poor should not be disturbed when they are lost in thought. The thing they are trying to think of may yet come to them.

The street was too deserted, its emptiness was wearied with itself and pulled out the footfall from under my feet and banged it about as if it were knocking a wooden clog. The woman was startled and started out of herself too rapidly and roughly, so that her face was left in her hands. I could see it lying in them, the hollow mould of it. It cost me an indescribable effort to keep my gaze on those hands and not look at what had been torn from out of them. I was appalled to see the inside of the facial mask, but I was far more terrified still of seeing a head bare and stripped of its face.

[6] I am afraid. It is essential to do something about your fear once you are afraid. It would be odious to fall ill here, and, if anyone thought of taking me to the Hôtel-Dieu, I should indubitably die there. The Hôtel is very pleasant, and extremely popular. It is hardly possible to view the façade of the cathedral of Paris2 without the risk of being run over by one of the many vehicles speeding as fast as they can go across the square to the Hôtel. These little omnibuses ring their bells continuously, and even the Duc de Sagan would needs have his carriage halted if some person or other at death's door took it into his head that he had to get to God's own Hôtel. The dying will have their way, and the whole of Paris stops in its tracks if Madame Legrand, the brocanteuse in the rue des Martyrs, comes to this Cité square. It is worth noting that these fiendish little vehicles have frosted-glass windows that excite the imagination quite extraordinarily: it takes no more than a concierge's powers to picture the most extravagant agonies behind them, and if one is possessed of greater imaginative resources, and allows them to wander freely in other directions, there need be no limit to speculation. But I have also seen open hackney carriages arriving, hired cabs with the tops folded down, making the trip for the standard fare of two francs per hour of death throes.

[7] This excellent Hôtel goes back a long way. In the days of King Clovis,3 people were already dying in some of the beds. Now they die in five hundred and fifty-nine of them. It is a factory production line, of course, and with such an immense output the quality of individual deaths may vary. But that is neither here nor there; it's quantity that counts. Who cares about a well-made death these days? No one. Even the rich, who could afford to die in well-appointed style, are lowering their standards and growing indifferent; the wish for a death of one's own is becoming ever more infrequent.