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Julien looked up with effort, and in a voice that trembled with the pounding of his heart, he explained that he wished to speak to Mr. Pirard, the principal of the seminary. Without saying a word, the black man beckoned him to follow. They climbed two flights up a wide wooden staircase, its jagged steps leaning away from the wall, ready to fall. A small door, surmounted by a large cemetery cross in white wood painted black, was opened with difficulty, and the doorman ushered him into a low, dark room, whose whitewashed walls were lined with two large paintings blackened by the passage of time. There, Julien was left alone; he was appalled, his heart beating violently; he would have been happy to have dared to cry. The whole house was deathly silent.

As soon as you entered the town, you were stunned by the clatter of a noisy, seemingly terrible machine. Twenty heavy hammers, falling with a noise that shakes the pavement, are raised by a wheel that is moved by the water of the torrent. Each of these hammers produces I don't know how many thousands of nails every day. It's the young, fresh and pretty girls who present to the blows of these enormous hammers the small pieces of iron that are quickly transformed into nails. This work, so hard on the surface, is one of the most astonishing for the traveller entering the mountains that separate France from Helvetia for the first time. If, on entering Verrières, the traveller asks who owns the beautiful nail factory that deafens people going up the main street, he is told with a drawling accent: Eh! it belongs to the mayor.