onal stand containing the orchestra. An oaken
rail, waist high, which served as a back to a cheap red bench, enclosed
the dancers. And against this rail, on the outside, were tables painted
green and two rows of benches, surrounding the dance with a cafe.

In the dancers' enclosure, beneath the fierce glare and the intense heat
of the gas, were women of all sorts, dressed in dark, worn, rumpled
woolens, women in black tulle caps, women in black _paletots_, women in
_caracos_ worn shiny at the seams, women in fur tippets bought of
open-air dealers and in shops in dark alleys. And in the whole
assemblage not one of the youthful faces was set off by a collar, not a
glimpse of a white skirt could be seen among the whirling dancers, not a
glimmer of white about these women, who were all dressed in gloomy
colors, the colors of want, to the ends of their unpolished shoes. This
absence of linen gave to the ball an aspect as of poverty in mourning;
it imparted to all the faces a touch of gloom and uncleanness, of
lifelessness and earthiness--a vaguely forbidding aspect, in which there
was a suggestion of the Hotel-Dieu and the Mont-de-Piete!

An old woman in a wig with the hair parted at the side passed in front
of the tables, with a basket filled with pieces of Savoy cake and red
apples.

From time to time the dance, in its twisting and turning, disclosed a
soiled stocking, the typical Jewish features of a street pedlar of
sponges, red fingers protruding from black mitts, a swarthy moustached
face, an under-petticoat soiled with the mud of night before last, a
second-hand-skirt, stiff and crumpled, of flowered calico, the cast-off
finery of some kept mistress.

The men wore _paletots_, small, soft caps pulled down over their ears,
and woolen comforters untied and hanging down their backs. They invited
the women to dance by pulling them by the cap ribbons that fluttered
behind them. Some few, in hats and frockcoats and colored shirts, had an
insolent air of domesticity and a swagger befitting grooms in some great
family.

Everybody was jumping and bustling about. The women frisked and capered
and gamboled, excited and stimulated by the spur of bestial pleasure.
And in the evolutions of the contra-dance, one could hear brothel
addresses given: _Impasse du Depotoir_.

Germinie entered the hall just at the conclusion of a quadrille to the
air of _La Casquette du pere Bugeaud_, in which the cymbals, the
sleigh-bells and the d