the Rue Roquepine was the most important and the one with
the best reputation in the district. It was kept by Madame Broquette,
a woman of forty, with a dignified if somewhat blotched face, who was
always very tightly laced in a faded silk gown of dead-leaf hue. But if
she represented the dignity and fair fame of the establishment in
its intercourse with clients, the soul of the place, the ever-busy
manipulator, was her husband, Monsieur Broquette, a little man with a
pointed nose, quick eyes, and the agility of a ferret. Charged with the
police duties of the office, the supervision and training of the nurses,
he received them, made them clean themselves, taught them to smile and
put on pleasant ways, besides penning them in their various rooms and
preventing them from eating too much. From morn till night he was ever
prowling about, scolding and terrorizing those dirty, ill-behaved, and
often lying and thieving women. The building, a dilapidated private
house, with a damp ground floor, to which alone clients were
admitted, had two upper stories, each comprising six rooms arranged as
dormitories, in which the nurses and their infants slept. There was no
end to the arrivals and departures there: the peasant women were ever
galloping through the place, dragging trunks about, carrying babes in
swaddling clothes, and filling the rooms and the passages with wild
cries and vile odors. And amid all this the house had another inmate,
Mademoiselle Broquette, Herminie as she was called, a long, pale,
bloodless girl of fifteen, who mooned about languidly among that swarm
of sturdy young women.

Boutan, who knew the house well, went in, followed by Mathieu. The
central passage, which was fairly broad, ended in a glass door, which
admitted one to a kind of courtyard, where a sickly conifer stood on
a round patch of grass, which the dampness rotted. On the right of the
passage was the office, whither Madame Broquette, at the request of her
customers, summoned the nurses, who waited in a neighboring room,
which was simply furnished with a greasy deal table in the centre. The
furniture of the office was some old Empire stuff, upholstered in red
velvet. There was a little mahogany centre table, and a gilt clock.
Then, on the left of the passage, near the kitchen, was the general
refectory, with two long tables, covered with oilcloth, and surrounded
by straggling chairs, whose straw seats were badly damaged. Just a
make-believe sweep wi