PRECIOUS

It was in the vicinity of a midday July. The sun had engraved
itself with a fiery needle on the many-breasted horizon.
The asphalt was quivering softly, exhaling that tender, tarry odour
that gives the carcinomous ideas at once puerile and
corrosive about the origin of their malady. A bus in green and
white livery, emblazoned with an enigmatic S, came to
gather from the neighbourhood of the Parc Monceau a small and
favoured batch of postulant-passengers into the moist
confines of sudiferous dissolution. On the back platform of this
masterpiece of the contemporary French automobile
industry, where itinerants were packed together like sardines
in a tin, an incorrigible rascal who was slowly advancing
towards the commencement of his fourth decade and who was
carrying between a neck of almost serpentine length and
a hat encircled by a cordelet a head as insipid as it was leaden
raised his voice to complain with an unfeigned bitterness
which seemed to emnate from a glass of gentrian-bitters, or from
any other liquid of similar properties, of a phenomenon
of the nature of a recurring blow or shock which in his opinion
had its origin in a hic et nunc present co-user of the P.P.T.B.
In order to give utterance to his lament he adopted the
acid tones of a venerable vidame who gets his hindquarters pinched in a public privy and who strange to state does not at all
approve of this compliment and is not at all that way inclined.

Later, when the sun had already descended by several degrees
the monumental stairway of its celestial parade and when
I was once more causing myself to be conveyed by another bus of the same line, I perceived the individual described above
displacing himself in a peripatetic fashion in the Cour de Rome
in the company of an individual ejusdem farinae who was
giving him, in this locality dedicated to auto- mobilistic circulation, sartorial advice which hung by the thread of a button.