PARISIAN FIGURES
Faces of hell

You have just returned to Paris, like everyone else, and you can admit that your first impression of the big city was its formidable welcome. We cannot say that the Saint-Lazare station has jumped around your neck if we dare this image nor that the rue de la Paix has adorned itself with olive branches for you.

And Paris, please note, is not the only one involved. Brussels is hardly, at first glance, more cheerful and more willing to welcome the provincial. And London - especially at Charing Cross station - is completely forbidding.
No! It's the welcome of the big city, it's its closed, brutal, hostile appearance, like a heavily guarded barracks; it is the suggestion, created upon entry by the row of caps and the customs officer's cape, that one greets, on entering, the post and the house marshal on duty...
And the Parisians! My God !! that they are ugly... We can say that, can't we, since we are there... And we do not want to pretend here that the inhabitants of La Châtre are all pretty, nor that the citizens of Tours are all delightful and made on the wheel, but it is certain, just as small balls dipped in an aniline compound immediately take on a given color, that humans soaked in the atmosphere of Paris quickly take on, with some exceptions, a certain harsh and particular ugliness...
Where does this come from?
This comes from the fact that they are not happy. We are pretty when we are happy. A child of three or four years old is happy. And it's almost always pretty. At least, for his mother... As for other people, since they don't look at him...
But when you're not happy, you're ugly. There is nothing uglier than the ugliness of envy or regret, and that, almost as awful, of desire... Parisians have hellish faces. Looking at them carefully, we are forced to note the exact resemblance, the rigorous parallelism of their faces with the features of the damned reproduced by Gustave Doré in his edition of Dante's Inferno...
As for the Londoners, they have sculpted chestnut faces; and the New Yorkers, perhaps even more so, present tortured faces. Without going exactly to the point of gnashing their teeth, their faces bear, without exception, the most obvious signs of concern, anguish, dull annoyance and worry.

Let's say you're reading this article on any Paris tram. Simply look up from the printed sheet, without warning your neighbor across the street, and tell me if this man looks happy, if this woman seems truly content with life.
Then look left, then right. Experience it on the Clichy tram, in the Metro, in a restaurant, and even, where material happiness should exist, in a luxury environment. I bet if you calculate the percentage of people who are pink-faced, smiling, satisfied and rested, that percentage doesn't reach three percent of the whole.
This man is thin; he has sunken cheeks; his nose goes down out of habit from having focused on too much daily work; his weakened body floats in his clothes, his dragging feet lead him to a task from which he has little chance of being able to extricate himself, and his coughing does not improve in the atmosphere of a North-South station.
As if his cheeks could no longer bear it, he loses his glasses; this other seems to be looking for square roots; this one looks like a dried-up drowned man; and these, all in a row on a bench, seem to be waiting at the prison depot for their transfer to Saint-Martin-de-Ré...
This little one has white on her chin, for three sous perhaps; she also has sixty rose-plated centimes; and over all this shine two large eyes of black light, two eyes of terror; she walks on heels that are too high and on hard pavement. And all day perhaps, clinging to an angry telephone, she responded to vain communications and futile orders coming from you, from me or from another agitated person. Poor daughter !
And these two men, with fat fingers gilded with rings, and who are exchanging business talk on a tram bench... Their faces are oblique, they have bags under their cheeks, and their eyes have a way of seeing in below and slide from one person to another, like the glint of a pike's dagger slips under the dull water of a pond. They speak in low voices and almost by signs. And with each of the numbers exchanged, because their vile and passionate conversation only concerns numbers, their eyebrows close more under a stubborn and wicked front