coeur, her tears
again mastered her. It was a dark, narrow passage, with a gutter for the
dirty water running alongside the wall; and the stench which she again
encountered there caused her to think of the fortnight she had passed
in the place with Lantier--a fortnight of misery and quarrels, the
recollection of which was now a bitter regret. It seemed to bring her
abandonment home to her.

Upstairs the room was bare, in spite of the sunshine which entered
through the open window. That blaze of light, that kind of dancing
golden dust, exposed the lamentable condition of the blackened ceiling,
and of the walls half denuded of paper, all the more. The only thing
left hanging in the room was a woman's small neckerchief, twisted like
a piece of string. The children's bedstead, drawn into the middle of
the apartment, displayed the chest of drawers, the open drawers of which
exposed their emptiness. Lantier had washed himself and had used up the
last of the pomatum--two sous' worth of pomatum in a playing card;
the greasy water from his hands filled the basin. And he had forgotten
nothing. The corner which until then had been filled by the trunk seemed
to Gervaise an immense empty space. Even the little mirror which hung on
the window-fastening was gone. When she made this discovery, she had a
presentiment. She looked on the mantel-piece. Lantier had taken away the
pawn tickets; the pink bundle was no longer there, between the two odd
zinc candlesticks.

She hung her laundry over the back of a chair and just stood there,
gazing around at the furniture. She was so dulled and bewildered that
she could no longer cry. She had only one sou left. Then, hearing Claude
and Etienne laughing merrily by the window, their troubles already
forgotten, she went to them and put her arms about them, losing herself
for a moment in contemplation of that long gray avenue where, that very
morning, she had watched the awakening of the working population, of the
immense work-shop of Paris.

At this hour immense heat was rising from the pavement and from all the
furnaces in the factories, setting alight a reflecting oven over the
city and beyond the octroi wall. Out upon this very pavement, into this
furnace blast, she had been tossed, alone with her little ones. As she
glanced up and down the boulevard, she was seized with a dull dread that
her life would be fixed there forever, between a slaughter-house and a
hospital.

CHAPTER II.

Thr