And in spite of the
poverty that had so suddenly overtaken them they walked without shame,
very poor and very great, with the sorrowful smile under which they
concealed the desolation of their souls. Workmen in dirty blouses passed
them by, who had more money in their pockets than they. No one ventured
to offer them the sou which is not refused to those who are hungry. At
the Rue Canoquin they stopped at the house of Gulraude. She had died
the week before. Two other attempts which they made failed. They were
reduced now to consider where they could borrow ten francs. They had
been walking about the town for three hours, but they could not resolve
to go home empty-handed.

Ah, this Plassans, with its Cours Sauvaire, its Rue de Rome, and its Rue
de la Banne, dividing it into three quarters; this Plassans; with its
windows always closed, this sun-baked town, dead in appearance, but
which concealed under this sleeping surface a whole nocturnal life of
the clubhouse and the gaming table. They walked through it three times
more with slackened pace, on this clear, calm close of a glowing August
day. In the yard of the coach office a few old stage-coaches, which
still plied between the town and the mountain villages, were standing
unharnessed; and under the thick shade of the plane trees at the doors
of the cafes, the customers, who were to be seen from seven o'clock
in the morning, looked after them smiling. In the new town, too, the
servants came and stood at the doors of the wealthy houses; they met
with less sympathy here than in the deserted streets of the Quartier St.
Marc, whose antique houses maintained a friendly silence. They returned
to the heart of the old quarter where they were most liked; they went as
far as St. Saturnin, the cathedral, whose apse was shaded by the garden
of the chapter, a sweet and peaceful solitude, from which a beggar drove
them by himself asking an alms from them. They were building rapidly in
the neighborhood of the railway station; a new quarter was growing up
there, and they bent their steps in that direction. Then they returned a
last time to the Place de la Sous-Prefecture, with a sudden reawakening
of hope, thinking that they might meet some one who would offer them
money. But they were followed only by the indulgent smile of the town,
at seeing them so united and so beautiful. Only one woman had tears in
her eyes, foreseeing, perhaps, the sufferings that awaited them. The
stones of the