A Night in Whitechapel by Guy de Maupassant

My friend Ledantec and I were twenty-five and we had come to London for the first time in our lives. It was a Saturday evening in December, cold and foggy, and I think that all that combined is more than enough to explain why my friend Ledantec and I were most abominably drunk, though, to tell the truth, we did not feel any discomfort from it. On the contrary, we were floating in an atmosphere of perfect bliss. We did not speak, certainly, for we were incapable of doing so, but then we had no inclination for conversation. What would be the good of it? We could so easily read all our thoughts in each others eyes! And all our thoughts consisted in the sweet and unique knowledge, that we were thinking about nothing whatever.

It was not, however, in order to arrive at that state of delicious, intellectual nihility, thai we had gone to mysterious Whitechapel. We had gone into the first public-house we saw, with the firm intention of studying manners and customs, -- not to mention morals, -- there as spectators, artists and philosophers, but in the second public-house we entered, we ourselves became like the objects of our investigations, that is to say, sponges soaked in alcohol. Between one public-house and the other, the outer air seemed to squeeze those sponges, which then got just as dry as before, and thus we rolled from public-house to public-house, until at last the sponges could not hold any more.