Finally the day had come to an end, under a lowering sky, he had had to trudge his way through the gusts of wind, splashing along in fondants of mud of sorbets of snow,, towards his lodgings and his restaurant; and lo and behold, to add insult to injury, dinner was aweful and the wine tasted like ink.
His feet frozen, squeezed into ankle boots that had started to warp in the deluge and the puddles, his cranium white-hot under the gas burner hissing over his head, he had hardly touched his food, and even now his bad luck refused to let go of him; his fire falterd, his lamp grew sooty, his tobacco was damp and kept going out, staining the cigarette-paper with a stream of yellow juice.
He was overcame by an immense sense of discouragement; the emptiness of his prison-like existence became evident, and, as he poked at the fire, Folantin, learning forward in his armchair, his foreead resting on the ledge of the fireplace, started to look back over the via dolorosa of his forty years, halting in despair as he came to each station of cross.
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