nkment of the road slopes down in oceans of
small stones.

Soon they would reach the last lantern hanging on a green post. People
were still coming and going about them. The road was alive and amused
the eyes. They met women carrying their husband's canes, lorettes in
silk dresses leaning on the arms of their blouse-clad brothers, old
women in bright-colored ginghams walking about with folded arms,
enjoying a moment's rest from labor. Workmen were drawing their children
in little wagons, urchins returning with their rods from fishing at
Saint-Ouen, and men and women dragging branches of flowering acacia at
the ends of sticks.

Sometimes a pregnant woman would pass, holding out her arms to a yet
small child, and casting the shadow of her pregnancy upon the wall.

And everyone moved tranquilly, blissfully, at a pace that told of the
wish to delay, with the awkward ease and the happy indolence of those
who walk for pleasure. No one was in a hurry, and against the unbroken
horizon line, crossed from time to time by the white smoke of a railroad
train, the groups of promenaders were like black spots, almost
motionless, in the distance.

Behind Montmartre, they came to those great moats, as it were, those
sloping squares, where narrow, gray, much-trodden paths cross and
recross. A few blades of shriveled, yellow grass grew thereabout,
softened by the rays of the setting sun, which they could see, all
ablaze, between the houses. And Germinie loved to watch the wool-combers
at work there, the quarry horses at pasture in the bare fields, the
madder-red trousers of the soldiers who were playing at bowls, the
children flying kites that made black spots in the clear air. Passing
all these, they turned to cross the bridge over the railroad by the
wretched settlement of ragpickers, the stonemasons' quarter at the foot
of Clignancourt hill. They would walk quickly by those houses built of
materials stolen from demolished buildings, and exuding the horrors they
conceal; the wretched structures, half cabin, half burrow, caused
Germinie a vague feeling of terror: it seemed to her as if all the
crimes of Night were lurking there.

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 up