and anguish at the thought of all the crime, all the shame, all the grief and distress that had passed through that anteroom in which he stood.  What terrible confessions must have been heard, what a procession of suffering, ignominy, and wretchedness must have been witnessed by that woman who received the children in her mysterious little office!  To her all the wreckage of the slums, all the woe lying beneath gilded life, all the abominations, all the tortures that remain unknown, were carried.  There in her office was the port for the shipwrecked, there the black hole that swallowed up the offspring of frailty and shame.  And while Mathieu’s spell of waiting continued he saw three poor creatures arrive at the hospital.  One was surely a work-girl, delicate and pretty though she looked, so thin, so pale too, and with so wild an air that he remembered a paragraph he had lately read in a newspaper, recounting how another such girl, after forsaking her child, had thrown herself into the river.  The second seemed to him to be a married woman, some workman’s wife, no doubt, overburdened with children and unable to provide food for another mouth; while the third was tall, strong, and insolent,—­one of those who bring three or four children to the hospital one after the other.  And all three women plunged in, and he heard them being penned in separate compartments by an attendant, while he, with stricken heart, realizing how heavily fate fell on some, still stood there waiting.

  * The “slide” system, which enabled a mother to deposit her child
    at the hospital without being seen by those within, ceased to be
    employed officially as far back as 1847; but the apparatus was
    long preserved intact, and I recollect seeing it in the latter
    years of the Second Empire, cir. 1867-70, when I was often at
    the artists’ studios in the neighborhood.  The aperture through
    which children were deposited in the sliding-box was close to
    the little door of which M. Zola speaks.—­Trans.

When La Couteau at last reappeared with empty arms she said never a word, and Mathieu put no question to her.  Still in silence, they took their seats in the cab; and only some ten minutes afterwards, when the vehicle was already rolling through bustling, populous streets, did the woman begin to laugh.  Then, as her companion, still silent and distant, did not condescend to ask her the cause of her sudden gayety, she ended by saying aloud: 

“Do you know why I am laughing?  If I kept you waiting a bit longer, it was because I met a friend of mine, an attendant in the house, just as I left the office.  She’s one of those who put the babies out to nurse in the provinces.* Well, my friend told me that she was going to Rougemont to-morrow with two other attendants, and that among others they would certainly have with them the little fellow I had just left at the hospital.”

  * There are only about 600 beds at the Hopital des Enfants
    Assistes, and the majority of the children deposited there
    are perforce placed out to purse in the country.—­Trans.