also: tidy old buffers, porters in greasy
jackets, and equivocal-looking individuals in black silk hats, while the
foot-path is overrun by a swarm of youngsters dragging toy carts without
wheels about, filling pails with sand, and screaming and fighting;
a dreadful crew, with ragged clothes and dirty noses, teeming in the
sunshine like vermin.

Mademoiselle Saget was so slight and thin that she always managed to
insinuate herself into a place on one of the benches. She listened to
what was being said, and started a conversation with her neighbour, some
sallow-faced workingman's wife, who sat mending linen, from time to time
producing handkerchiefs and stockings riddled with holes from a little
basket patched up with string. Moreover, Mademoiselle Saget had
plenty of acquaintances here. Amidst the excruciating squalling of
the children, and the ceaseless rumble of the traffic in the Rue Saint
Denis, she took part in no end of gossip, everlasting tales about the
tradesmen of the neighbourhood, the grocers, the butchers, and the
bakers, enough, indeed, to fill the columns of a local paper, and the
whole envenomed by refusals of credit and covert envy, such as is always
harboured by the poor. From these wretched creatures she also obtained
the most disgusting revelations, the gossip of low lodging-houses and
doorkeepers' black-holes, all the filthy scandal of the neighbourhood,
which tickled her inquisitive appetite like hot spice.

As she sat with her face turned towards the markets, she had immediately
in front of her the square and its three blocks of houses, into the
windows of which her eyes tried to pry. She seemed to gradually rise
and traverse the successive floors right up to the garret skylights.
She stared at the curtains; based an entire drama on the appearance of
a head between two shutters; and, by simply gazing at the facades, ended
by knowing the history of all the dwellers in these houses. The Baratte
Restaurant, with its wine shop, its gilt wrought-iron _marquise_,
forming a sort of terrace whence peeped the foliage of a few plants in
flower-pots, and its four low storeys, all painted and decorated, had an
especial interest for her. She gazed at its yellow columns standing
out against a background of tender blue, at the whole of its imitation
temple-front daubed on the facade of a decrepit, tumble-down house,
crowned at the summit by a parapet of painted zinc. Behind the
red-striped window-blinds she espi