ns came
hedgerows, estates for sale, unfinished buildings erected upon the line
of projected streets and stretching out their jagged walls into empty
space, with heaps of broken bottles at their feet; large, low, plastered
houses, with windows filled with bird-cages and cloths, and with the Y
of the sink-pipes at every floor; and openings into enclosures that
resembled barnyards, studded with little mounds on which goats were
browsing.

They would stop here and there and smell the flowers, inhale the perfume
of a meagre lilac growing in a narrow lane. Germinie would pluck a leaf
in passing and nibble at it.

Flocks of joyous swallows flew wildly about in circles and in fantastic
figures over her head. The birds called. The sky answered the cages. She
heard everything about her singing, and glanced with a glad eye at
the women in chemisettes at the windows, the men in their shirt sleeves
in the little gardens, the mothers on the doorsteps with their little
ones between their legs.

[Illustration: Chapter XII

_But at the fortifications her pleasure returned. She would go with
Jupillon and sit upon the slope of the embankment. Beside her were
families innumerable, workmen lying flat upon their faces, small
annuitants gazing at the horizon through spy-glasses, philosophers of
want, bent double, with their hands upon their knees, the greasy coats
characteristic of old men, and black hats worn as red as their red
beards._]

At the foot of the slope the pavement came to an end. The street was
succeeded by a broad, white, chalky, dusty road, made of debris, old
pieces of plaster, crumbs of lime and bricks; a sunken road, with deep
ruts, polished on the edges, made by the iron tires of the huge great
wheels of carts laden with hewn stone. At that point began the things
that collect where Paris ends, the things that grow where grass does not
grow, one of those arid landscapes that large cities create around them,
the first zone of suburbs _intra muros_ where nature is exhausted, the
soil used up, the fields sown with oyster shells. Beyond was a
wilderness of half-enclosed yards displaying numbers of carts and trucks
with their shafts in the air against the sky, stone-cutters' sheds,
factories built of boards, unfinished workmen's houses, full of gaps and
open to the light, and bearing the mason's flag, wastes of gray and
white sand, kitchen gardens marked out with cords, and, on the lower
level, bogs to which the emba