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seemed to have lost some of its shape, much of its colour, and all of its identity. The giant began to berate her, though whether for her cooking or for her lack of honesty it was impossible to tell; though both parties were English, their bellowing and screeching were conducted in the excluding lingua franca of the encampments.
    Still smiling at this comedy, the French party returned to their carriage.

    The curé of Pavilly, brought to order by his bishop, left the realm of the theoretical. It was his duty to warn his parishioners in the sternest of terms against contact with the approaching army of Philistines and Barbarians. He had conducted an investigation, even going among them himself, and had obtained the following intelligence. First, that they were Christians neither in the observance of the faith nor in theirmoral behaviour. As proof of this, they had rejected their names of Christian baptism, preferring to make themselves known by false names, no doubt with the intention of misleading the forces of order. They did not observe the Sabbath, either working upon the holy day, or else reserving it for activities which ranged from the frivolous, like the washing of their dogs, to the criminal, as in the use of the same dogs for the theft of game and livestock. It was true that they worked hard, and were justly rewarded for their labours, but their threefold wages merely thrust them three times deeper into brutishness. Nor had they any sense of thrift, spending their money as they got it, preferably upon drink. They thieved with no attempt at concealment. Further, they flouted the laws of Christian marriage, living with women in an open state of fornication, and even denying such women the least modesty; their communal huts amounted to no more than dens of prostitution. Those who spoke their own native language blasphemed constantly in the course of their labour; while those who spoke the common language of the excavations were no better than the builders of the Tower of Babel - and did not the Tower remain unfinished and its builders confounded and scattered upon the face of the earth? Finally and greatly, the navvies were blasphemers by their very deeds, since they exalted the valleys and made the rough places plain for their own purposes, heedless and scornful of the purposes of the Lord.
    The farmer who kept the fields at Les Pucelles nodded approvingly at the priest. What did you come to church for, if not to hear a powerful denunciation of others and an implicit confirmation of your own virtue? The girl Adèle in the back pew had also been attending carefully, her mouth falling open on occasion.
    The French party, who had become regular gawpers at the excavations, who had marvelled at the skills and scorned dangers of the barrow-run, and had come to comprehend why an English navvy was paid 3s 6d to 3s 9d per diem while his French counterpart received 1s 8d to 2s 3d, visited the railway workings for the last time towards the end of the year 1845. The Viaduct at Barentin was now almost complete. Across frosted fields they viewed the structure: 100 feet high, one third of a mile long, with twenty-seven arches each boasting a span of 50 feet. It had cost, Charles-André assured them, some fifty thousand English pounds, and was soon to be inspected by the Minister of Public Works and other high French officials.
    Dr Achille examined the slow curve of the Viaduct as it crossed the valley floor, and counted off to himself the elegant, symmetrical arches. ‘I cannot think,’ he said at last, ‘why my brother, who claims to be an artist, cannot see the immense beauty of the railways. Why should he dislike them so intensely? He is too young to be so old-fashioned.’
    ‘He maintains, I believe,’ replied Mme Julie with some care, ‘that scientific advances make us blind to moral defects. They give us the illusion that we are making progress, which he contends to be dangerous. At least, this is what he says,’ she