he doors projecting lanterns
bearing enormous numbers on their rough colored glass. Under the narrow
arches at the entrance to the houses, women wearing aprons like servants,
seated on straw chairs, rose up on seeing them coming near, taking three
steps towards the gutter which separated the street into two halves, and
which cut off the path from this file of men, who sauntered along at
their leisure, humming and sneering, already getting excited by the
vicinity of those dens of prostitutes.

Sometimes, at the end of a hall, appeared, behind a second open door,
which presented itself unexpectedly, covered over with dark leather, a
big wench, undressed, whose heavy thighs and fat calves abruptly outlined
themselves under her coarse white cotton wrapper. Her short petticoat had
the appearance of a puffed out girdle; and the soft flesh of her breast,
her shoulders, and her arms, made a rosy stain on a black velvet corsage
with edgings of gold lace. She kept calling out from her distant corner,
"Will you come here, my pretty boys?" and sometimes she would go out
herself to catch hold of one of them, and to drag him towards her door
with all her strength, fastening on to him like a spider drawing forward
an insect bigger than itself. The man, excited by the struggle, would
offer a mild resistance, and the rest would stop to look on, undecided
between the longing to go in at once and that of lengthening this
appetizing promenade. Then when the woman, after desperate efforts, had
brought the sailor to the threshold of her abode, in which the entire
band would be swallowed up after him, Celestin Duclos, who was a judge of
houses of this sort, suddenly exclaimed: "Don't go in there, Marchand!
That's not the place."

The man, thereupon, obeying this direction, freed himself with a brutal
shake; and the comrades formed themselves into a band once more, pursued
by the filthy insults of the exasperated wench, while other women, all
along the alley, in front of them, came out past their doors, attracted
by the noise, and in hoarse voices threw out to them invitations coupled
with promises. They went on, then, more and more stimulated, from the
combined effects of the coaxings and the seductions held out as baits to
them by the choir of portresses of love all over the upper part of the
street, and the ignoble maledictions hurled at them by the choir at the
lower end--the despised choir of disappointed wenches. From time to time,
they