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[Man In Room 5]

Since I commented upon someone else's fiction I guess I should post something myself. I know I've talked about writing here but never actually offered anything for criticism. So, here's part of a novel.

It's set in 1800s France (hence the French names). This scene opens with a bit of comedy. The main character watches his over zealous servant cleaning, and right about the time it starts getting on his nerves, his friend arrives and they take a walk to visit another friend who is the local bell ringer at the church.

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"What a nuisance!" thought Durtal today, as he heard a key turning in
the lock, then he looked at his watch and observed that once again the
concierge was arriving after three o'clock in the afternoon.

There was nothing for it but to submit with a sigh to the ensuing
hullabaloo. Rateau, somnolent and pacific in his lodge, became a demon
when he got a broom in his hand. In this sedentary being, who could
drowse all morning in the stale basement atmosphere heavy with the
cumulative aroma of many meat-stews, a martial ardour, a warlike
ferocity, then asserted themselves, and like a red revolutionary he
assaulted the bed, charged the chairs, manhandled the picture frames,
knocked the tables over, rattled the water pitcher, and whirled Durtal's
brogues about by the laces as when a pillaging conqueror hauls a
ravished victim along by the hair. So he stormed the apartment like a
barricade and triumphantly brandished his battle standard, the dust rag,
over the reeking carnage of the furniture.

Durtal at such times sought refuge in the room which was not being
attacked. Today Rateau launched his offensive against the workroom, so
Durtal fled to the bedroom. From there, through the half open door, he
could see the enemy, with a feather duster like a Mohican war bonnet
over his head, doing a scalp dance around a table.

"If I only knew at what time that pest would break in on me so I could
always arrange to be out!" groaned Durtal. Now he ground his teeth, as
Rateau, with a yell, grabbed up the mop and, skating around on one leg,
belaboured the floor lustily.

The perspiring conqueror then appeared in the doorway and advanced to
reduce the chamber where Durtal was. The latter had to return to the
subjugated workroom, and the cat, shocked by the racket, arched its back
and, rubbing against its master's legs, followed him to a place of
safety.

In the thick of the conflict Des Hermies rang the door bell.

"I'll put on my shoes," cried Durtal, "and we'll get out of this.
Look--" he passed his hand over the table and brought back a coat of
grime that made him appear to be wearing a grey glove--"look. That brute
turns the house upside down and knocks everything to pieces, and here's
the result. He leaves more dust when he goes than he found when he came
in!"

"Bah," said Des Hermies, "dust isn't a bad thing. Besides having the
taste of ancient biscuit and the smell of an old book, it is the
floating velvet which softens hard surfaces, the fine dry wash which
takes the garishness out of crude colour schemes. It is the caparison of
abandon, the veil of oblivion. Who, then, can despise it--aside from
certain persons whose lamentable lot must often have wrung a tear from
you?

"Imagine living in one of these Paris passages. Think of a consumptive
spitting blood and suffocating in a room one flight up, behind the gables of, say the passage des Panoramas, for instance. When the window is open the dust comes in impregnated with snu ff and saturated with clammy exudations. The invalid, choking, begs for air, and in order that he may breathe the window is closed.

"Well, the dust that you complain of is rather milder than that. Anyway
I don't hear you coughing.... But if you're ready we'll be on our way."

"Where shall we go?" asked Durtal.

Des Hermies did not answer. They left the rue du Regard, in which Durtal
lived, and went down the rue du Cherche-Midi as far as the Croix-Rouge.

"Let's go on to the place Saint-Sulpice," said Des Hermies, and after a
silence he continued, "Speaking of dust, 'out of which we came and to
which we shall return,' do you know that after we are dead our corpses
are devoured by different kinds of worms according as we are fat or
thin? In fat corpses one species of maggot is found, the rhizophagus,
while thin corpses are patronized only by the phora. The latter is
evidently the aristocrat, the fastidious gourmet which turns up its nose
at a heavy meal of copious breasts and juicy fat bellies. Just think,
there is no perfect equality, even in the manner in which we feed the
worms.

"But this is where we stop."

They had come to where the rue Ferou opens into the place Saint-Sulpice.
Durtal looked up and on an unenclosed porch in the flank of the church
of Saint-Sulpice he read the placard, "Tower open to visitors."

"Let's go up," said Des Hermies.

"What for! In this weather?" and Durtal pointed at the yellow sky over
which black clouds, like factory smoke, were racing, so low that the tin
chimneys seemed to penetrate them and crenelate them with little spots
of clarity. "I am not enthusiastic about trying to climb a flight of
broken, irregular stairs. And anyway, what do you think you can see up
there? It's misty and getting dark. No, have a heart."

"What difference is it to you where you take your airing? Come on. I
assure you you will see something unusual."

"Oh! you brought me here on purpose?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't you say so?"

He followed Des Hermies into the darkness under the porch. At the back
of the cellarway a little essence lamp, hanging from a nail, lighted a
door, the tower entrance.

For a long time, in utter darkness, they climbed a winding stair. Durtal
was wondering where the keeper had gone, when, turning a corner, he saw
a shaft of light, then he stumbled against the rickety supports of a
"double-current" lamp in front of a door. Des Hermies pulled a bell cord
and the door swung back.

Above them on a landing they could see feet, whether of a man or of a
woman they could not tell.

"Ah! it's you, M. des Hermies," and a woman bent over, describing an
arc, so that her head was in a stream of light. "Louis will be very glad
to see you."

"Is he in?" asked Des Hermies, reaching up and shaking hands with the
woman.

"He is in the tower. Won't you stop and rest a minute?"

"Why, when we come down, if you don't mind."

"Then go up until you see a grated door--but what an old fool I am! You
know the way as well as I do."

"To be sure, to be sure.... But, in passing, permit me to introduce my
friend Durtal."

Durtal, somewhat flustered, made a bow in the darkness.

"Ah, monsieur, how fortunate. Louis is so anxious to meet you."

"Where is he taking me?" Durtal wondered as again he groped along behind
his friend, now and then, just as he felt completely lost, coming to the
narrow strip of light admitted by a barbican, and again proceeding in
inky darkness. The climb seemed endless. Finally they came to the barred
door, opened it, and found themselves on a frame balcony with the abyss
above and below. Des Hermies, who seemed perfectly at home, pointed
downward, then upward. They were halfway up a tower the face of which
was overlaid with enormous criss-crossing joists and beams riveted
together with bolt heads as big as a man's fist. Durtal could see no
one. He turned and, clinging to the hand rail, groped along the wall
toward the daylight which stole down between the inclined leaves of the
sounding-shutters.

Leaning out over the precipice, he discerned beneath him a formidable
array of bells hanging from oak supports lined with iron. The sombre
bell metal was slick as if oiled and absorbed light without refracting
it. Bending backward, he looked into the upper abyss and perceived new
batteries of bells overhead. These bore the raised effigy of a bishop,
and a place in each, worn by the striking of the clapper, shone golden.

All were in quiescence, but the wind rattled against the
sounding-shutters, stormed through the cage of timbers, howled along the
spiral stair, and was caught and held whining in the bell vases.
Suddenly a light breeze, like the stirring of confined air, fanned his
cheek. He looked up. The current had been set in motion by the swaying
of a great bell beginning to get under way. There was a crash of sound,
the bell gathered momentum, and now the clapper, like a gigantic pestle,
was grinding the great bronze mortar with a deafening clamour. The tower
trembled, the balcony on which Durtal was standing trepidated like the
floor of a railway coach, there was the continuous rolling of a mighty
reverberation, interrupted regularly by the jar of metal upon metal.