curiosity led him to risk one more little peep through an open loophole.  The room was empty, and under the flare of the gas a solitary chamber pot stood forgotten among a heap of petticoats trailing on the floor.  This room afforded him his ultimate impression.  Upstairs on the fourth floor he was well-nigh suffocated.  All the scents, all the blasts of heat, had found their goal there.  The yellow ceiling looked as if it had been baked, and a lamp burned amid fumes of russet-colored fog.  For some seconds he leaned upon the iron balustrade which felt warm and damp and well-nigh human to the touch.  And he shut his eyes and drew a long breath and drank in the sexual atmosphere of the place.  Hitherto he had been utterly ignorant of it, but now it beat full in his face.

“Do come here,” shouted Fauchery, who had vanished some moments ago.  “You’re being asked for.”

At the end of the corridor was the dressing room belonging to Clarisse and Simonne.  It was a long, ill-built room under the roof with a garret ceiling and sloping walls.  The light penetrated to it from two deep-set openings high up in the wall, but at that hour of the night the dressing room was lit by flaring gas.  It was papered with a paper at seven sous a roll with a pattern of roses twining over green trelliswork.  Two boards, placed near one another and covered with oilcloth, did duty for dressing tables.  They were black with spilled water, and underneath them was a fine medley of dinted zinc jugs, slop pails and coarse yellow earthenware crocks.  There was an array of fancy articles in the room—­a battered, soiled and well-worn array of chipped basins, of toothless combs, of all those manifold untidy trifles which, in their hurry and carelessness, two women will leave scattered about when they undress and wash together amid purely temporary surroundings, the dirty aspect of which has ceased to concern them.

“Do come here,” Fauchery repeated with the good-humored familiarity which men adopt among their fallen sisters.  “Clarisse is wanting to kiss you.”

Muffat entered the room at last.  But what was his surprise when he found the Marquis de Chouard snugly enscounced on a chair between the two dressing tables!  The marquis had withdrawn thither some time ago.  He was spreading his feet apart because a pail was leaking and letting a whitish flood spread over the floor.  He was visibly much at his ease, as became a man who knew all the snug corners, and had grown quite merry in the close dressing room, where people might have been bathing, and amid those quietly immodest feminine surroundings which the uncleanness of the little place rendered at once natural and poignant.

“D’you go with the old boy?” Simonne asked Clarisse in a whisper.

“Rather!” replied the latter aloud.

The dresser, a very ugly and extremely familiar young girl, who was helping Simonne into her coat, positively writhed with laughter.  The three pushed each other and babbled little phrases which redoubled their merriment.