they became abject strumpets, and their
hunt for men grew more ferocious than ever. Beneath the trees in the
darkening and fast-emptying boulevards fierce bargainings took place,
accompanied by oaths and blows. Respectable family parties--fathers,
mothers and daughters--who were used to such scenes, would pass quietly
by the while without quickening their pace. Afterward, when they had
walked from the opera to the GYMNASE some half-score times and in the
deepening night men were rapidly dropping off homeward for good and all,
Nana and Satin kept to the sidewalk in the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre.
There up till two o'clock in the morning restaurants, bars and
ham-and-beef shops were brightly lit up, while a noisy mob of women
hung obstinately round the doors of the cafes. This suburb was the only
corner of night Paris which was still alight and still alive, the only
market still open to nocturnal bargains. These last were openly struck
between group and group and from one end of the street to the other,
just as in the wide and open corridor of a disorderly house. On such
evenings as the pair came home without having had any success they used
to wrangle together. The Rue Notre Dame de la Lorette stretched dark and
deserted in front of them. Here and there the crawling shadow of a woman
was discernible, for the Quarter was going home and going home late,
and poor creatures, exasperated at a night of fruitless loitering,
were unwilling to give up the chase and would still stand, disputing in
hoarse voices with any strayed reveler they could catch at the corner of
the Rue Breda or the Rue Fontaine.

Nevertheless, some windfalls came in their way now and then in the shape
of louis picked up in the society of elegant gentlemen, who slipped
their decorations into their pockets as they went upstairs with them.
Satin had an especially keen scent for these. On rainy evenings, when
the dripping city exhaled an unpleasant odor suggestive of a great
untidy bed, she knew that the soft weather and the fetid reek of the
town's holes and corners were sure to send the men mad. And so she
watched the best dressed among them, for she knew by their pale eyes
what their state was. On such nights it was as though a fit of fleshly
madness were passing over Paris. The girl was rather nervous certainly,
for the most modish gentlemen were always the most obscene. All the
varnish would crack off a man, and the brute beast would show itself,
exactin