public houses in the Boulevard Saint-Michel.  But the vacations were drawing on, and the Quarter looked too starved.  Eventually they always returned to the principal boulevards, for it was there they ran the best chance of getting what they wanted.  From the heights of Montmartre to the observatory plateau they scoured the whole town in the way we have been describing.  They were out on rainy evenings, when their boots got worn down, and on hot evenings, when their linen clung to their skins.  There were long periods of waiting and endless periods of walking; there were jostlings and disputes and the nameless, brutal caresses of the stray passer-by who was taken by them to some miserable furnished room and came swearing down the greasy stairs afterward.

The summer was drawing to a close, a stormy summer of burning nights.  The pair used to start out together after dinner, toward nine o’clock.  On the pavements of the Rue Notre Dame de la Lorette two long files of women scudded along with tucked-up skirts and bent heads, keeping close to the shops but never once glancing at the displays in the shopwindows as they hurried busily down toward the boulevards.  This was the hungry exodus from the Quartier Breda which took place nightly when the street lamps had just been lit.  Nana and Satin used to skirt the church and then march off along the Rue le Peletier.  When they were some hundred yards from the Cafe Riche and had fairly reached their scene of operations they would shake out the skirts of their dresses, which up till that moment they had been holding carefully up, and begin sweeping the pavements, regardless of dust.  With much swaying of the hips they strolled delicately along, slackening their pace when they crossed the bright light thrown from one of the great cafes.  With shoulders thrown back, shrill and noisy laughter and many backward glances at the men who turned to look at them, they marched about and were completely in their element.  In the shadow of night their artificially whitened faces, their rouged lips and their darkened eyelids became as charming and suggestive as if the inmates of a make-believe trumpery oriental bazaar had been sent forth into the open street.  Till eleven at night they sauntered gaily along among the rudely jostling crowds, contenting themselves with an occasional “dirty ass!” hurled after the clumsy people whose boot heels had torn a flounce or two from their dresses.  Little familiar salutations would pass between them and the cafe waiters, and at times they would stop and chat in front of a small table and accept of drinks, which they consumed with much deliberation, as became people not sorry to sit down for a bit while waiting for the theaters to empty.  But as night advanced, if they had not made one or two trips in the direction of the Rue la Rochefoucauld, they became abject strumpets, and their hunt for men grew more ferocious than ever.  Beneath the trees in the darkening and fast-emptying boulevards fierce