Another model for your twice-told tale.

Two excerpts from "Exercises in style" by Raymond Queneau

Reported Speech

Dr. Queneau said that i had happened at midday. Some passengers had got into the bus. They had been squeashed tightly together. On his head a young man had been wearing a hat which had been encircled by a plait and not by a ribbon. He had had a long neck. He had complained to the man standing next to him about the continual jostling which the latter had been inflicting on him. As soon as he had noticed a vacant seat, said Dr. Queneau, the young man had rushed off towards it and sat down upon it.

He had seen them later, Dr. Queneau continued, in front of the gare Sain-Lazare. He had been wearing an overcoat, and a friend who had happened to be present had made a remark to thim to the effect that he ought to put an extra button on said overcoat.

Hesitation

I don't really know where it happened... in a church, a dustbin, a charnel-house? A bus, perhaps? There were... but what were there, though? Eggs, carpets, radishes? Skeletons? Yes, but with their flesh still around them, and alive. I think that's how it was. People in a bus. But one (or two?) of them was making himself conspicuous, i don't really know in what way. For his megalomania? For his adiposity? For his melancholy? Rather... more precisely for his youth, which was embellished by a long... nose? Chin? Thumb? No: neck, and by a strange, strange, strange, hat. He started to quarrel, yes, that's right, with, no doubt, another passenger (man or woman? Child or old age pernsioner?) This ended, this finished by ending in a commonplace sort of way, probably by the flight of one of the two adversaries.

I rather think that it was the same character I met, but where? In front of a church? In front of a charnel-house? In front of a dustbin? With a friend who must have been talking to him about something, but about what? About what?