levard. Frequently she walked thus for hours,
shamefaced and mud-stained, in the fog and darkness, amid the iniquitous
and horrible surroundings of an avenue near the barriers, where darkness
reigned. She followed the line of red-wine shops, the naked arbors, the
_cabaret_ trellises supported by dead trees such as we see in bear-pits,
low, flat hovels with curtainless windows cut at random in the walls,
cap factories where shirts are sold, and wicked-looking hotels where a
night's lodging may be had. She passed by closed, hermetically-sealed
shops, black with bankruptcy, by fragments of condemned walls, by dark
passageways with iron gratings, by walled-up windows, by doors that
seemed to give admission to those abodes of murder, the plan of which is
handed to the jury at the assizes. As she went on, there were gloomy
little gardens, crooked buildings, architecture in its most degraded
form, tall, mouldy _portes-cocheres_, hedge-rows, within which could be
vaguely seen the uncanny whiteness of stones in the darkness, corners of
unfinished buildings from which arose the stench of nitrification, walls
disfigured by disgusting placards and fragments of torn advertisements
by which they were spotted with loathsome publications as by leprosy.
From time to time, at a sharp turn in the street, she would come upon
lanes that seemed to plunge into dark holes a few steps from their
beginning, and from which a blast of damp air came forth as from a
cellar; dark no-thoroughfares stood out against the sky with the
rigidity of a great wall; streets stretched vaguely away in the
distance, with the feeble gleam of a lantern twinkling here and there at
long intervals upon the ghostly plaster fronts of the houses.

Germinie would walk on and on. She would cover all the territory where
low debauchery fills its crop on Mondays and finds its loves, between a
hospital, a slaughter-house, and a cemetery; Lariboisiere, the Abattoir
and Montmartre.

The people who passed that way--the workman returning from Paris
whistling; the workingwoman, her day's work ended, hurrying on with her
hands under her armpits to keep herself warm; the street-walker in her
black cap--would stare at her as they passed. Strange men acted as if
they recognized her; the light made her ashamed. She would turn and run
toward the other end of the boulevard and follow the dark, deserted
footway along the city wall; but she was soon driven away by horrible
shadows of men a