The typesetters have the use of a shelf under the type fonts. They add a stool, a cardboard box for type characters, and a little shelf for soap. Dillot, the seminarist, who killed his brother after endless quarreling over a two-thousand-franc inheritance, has made himself a sort of altar out of holy images from breviaries. During the fifteen-minute noon break, he bows his sharp profile over a tiny Sacred Heart of Jesus, turns his eyes away from the world, and prays. My neighbor and good pal, Guillaumet—a jolly hooligan whose Mediterranean good humor almost never leaves him (“When my six years are up”—a broad wink here—“I’ll still have fifteen good years left! and I know how to live, you know!”)—told me with the air of a connoisseur: “He gets nuttier and nuttier. Wait and see what happens next.” Another neighbor lives in a strange squalor. He is right in front of me. Whenever I raise my eyes above the type font, I see his naked cranium dotted with dirty-gray hairs around the neck, his greenish skull, livid at the temples.
