Pigritia is a terrible word.

It engenders a world, la pègre, read robbery, and a hell, la pègrenne, read hunger.

So idleness is a mother.

She has a son, robbery, and a daughter, hunger.

So where are we now?

In the middle of an incredibly long tangent that goes on approximately forever about what amounts to 1800s French jive talk.

Let's move on to the sewers.

We might say that, for ten centuries, the cloaca has been the disease of Paris. The sewer is the taint which the city has in her blood. The popular instinct is never mistaken. The trade of sewerman was formerly almost as perilous, and almost as repulsive to the people, as the trade of knacker so long stricken with horror, and abandoned to the executioner. It required high wages to persuade a mason to disappear into that fetid ooze; the well-digger's ladder hesitated to—

A loud, authoritative knock sounded on the door. The pen, which a grizzled-looking bearded man had been writing with, stopped moving and the man looked up, annoyed. From the evening gloom without muted voices could be heard in discussion.

"Marius? Oh, the boy. Put him down on the stoop."

"What about me? I could—" This second, wheedling voice was cut off.

"Take care you don't steal anything, or I'll arrest you now, and I don't care what it does to the plot."

A third voice broke in soothingly. "Please—remember our agreement. A truce for now while we see to this matter. You may wait out here. We'll take care of this."

The writer hadn't moved from his seat at his desk to answer the knock, but was staring straight ahead at the wall of the study, an unreadable expression on his face, when the door swung open, letting a draft of cool air into the cozy room and raising the hair on the back of his neck. He turned around. A powerfully built, venerable man had crossed the doorstep. His hair was completely white. He moved slightly to the side to allow his taller sideburned companion, who had been standing behind him, to enter the room as well. Still outside, a smaller shadowy figure watched with interest for a moment and then bent over, apparently to rummage through a fourth, inert man's clothing.

The white-haired man and the tall man approached the still-seated writer, peering at him with obvious curiosity. There was a brief silence, and then the spell was broken.

"What do you think you're doing?" demanded the tall man.

"Wha—?"

"You've left us in a difficult position," added his companion, but without recrimination in his voice.

After a pause, the writer found his voice. "I don't understand. Who— What are you upset about?" The two visitors looked at each other in disbelief, as if to say, "He can't be serious." The tall man recovered his voice first.

"How long do you think it takes to make a report to the police?" He snorted. "Not twenty pages, I can tell you. I waited around the station as long as I could; I stood, I sat, I played pinochle with the desk sergeant...I went out, did some patrolling, looking for someone suspicious to follow...all the while listening to you describe the Parisian sewers. I'm fed up!"

"But—"

The white-haired man joined in, though not as forcefully. "I've been carrying a half-dead student through these sewers, through the muck and the filth, which you describe in great detail. I can't go on like that much longer. I'm an old man; I'm tired."

The shadowy figure slunk into the room. "And I'm running out of petty thefts to commit. I'm either going to have to head for the quay soon, or go fence some of this." He held up a grimy sack and retreated back to the doorstep under the tall man's glare.

"Now..." began the white-haired man calmly as he and his companion advanced towards the writer, who noticed uneasily that the taller man had a formidable stick in his grasp.

"What do we have to do," the tall man continued, leaning forward so that he was face-to-face with the man at the desk, "to get some resolution here?" The writer sat in his chair, mutely looking from one man to the other. "Neither of us can keep up this stalling up for much longer. We need some narrative."

"Let's be reasonable..." the writer started.

"Yes, let's," said the tall man bitingly. "Several books back I was dropped from the story for a couple hundred pages. What, I ask you, was I supposed to do? Teach myself needlepoint? Because I was assuredly not interested in a commentary on convents."

"You left me in prison—for a second time—so you could write about 'Napoleon in good humor,' and the mud at Waterloo—for sixty pages," the white-haired man said, after a pause and a nudge from his companion.

"So what you're saying is..." The bewildered man at the desk trailed off.

"Is get on with it!" the tall man snapped. There was a pause. "Do we understand each other?" The writer nodded his comprehension, which seemed to satisfy the strange visitors who in turn nodded their satisfaction.

The man at the desk watched as the two men turned and left, stopping at the doorway as the white-haired man collected the unconscious young man. The furtive thief had already gone, and so when the tall man reached across and pulled the door shut, the writer was once again alone. He sat for a few minutes, not moving, then shook his head once, as if to clear it of an outlandish, impossible idea, and, with a strange glance at the thick stack of papers already accumulated on the desk, hurried to pick up his pen and resume his writing.