Summary

The space of the museum as the visitor travels through it is a long sentence of sleep. But if suddenly this sleep is interrupted, if this space is torn apart, if the hydrometric devices go haywire, then like a sleepwalker who is awakened at the edge of a roof, the object decomposes as everything has decomposed before it. which allowed it to exist. When tuberoses decompose, Zola notes, they smell human.