bargainings took place, accompanied by oaths and blows.  Respectable family parties—­fathers, mothers and daughters—­who were used to such scenes, would pass quietly by the while without quickening their pace.  Afterward, when they had walked from the opera to the GYMNASE some half-score times and in the deepening night men were rapidly dropping off homeward for good and all, Nana and Satin kept to the sidewalk in the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre.  There up till two o’clock in the morning restaurants, bars and ham-and-beef shops were brightly lit up, while a noisy mob of women hung obstinately round the doors of the cafes.  This suburb was the only corner of night Paris which was still alight and still alive, the only market still open to nocturnal bargains.  These last were openly struck between group and group and from one end of the street to the other, just as in the wide and open corridor of a disorderly house.  On such evenings as the pair came home without having had any success they used to wrangle together.  The Rue Notre Dame de la Lorette stretched dark and deserted in front of them.  Here and there the crawling shadow of a woman was discernible, for the Quarter was going home and going home late, and poor creatures, exasperated at a night of fruitless loitering, were unwilling to give up the chase and would still stand, disputing in hoarse voices with any strayed reveler they could catch at the corner of the Rue Breda or the Rue Fontaine.

Nevertheless, some windfalls came in their way now and then in the shape of louis picked up in the society of elegant gentlemen, who slipped their decorations into their pockets as they went upstairs with them.  Satin had an especially keen scent for these.  On rainy evenings, when the dripping city exhaled an unpleasant odor suggestive of a great untidy bed, she knew that the soft weather and the fetid reek of the town’s holes and corners were sure to send the men mad.  And so she watched the best dressed among them, for she knew by their pale eyes what their state was.  On such nights it was as though a fit of fleshly madness were passing over Paris.  The girl was rather nervous certainly, for the most modish gentlemen were always the most obscene.  All the varnish would crack off a man, and the brute beast would show itself, exacting, monstrous in lust, a past master in corruption.  But besides being nervous, that trollop of a Satin was lacking in respect.  She would blurt out awful things in front of dignified gentlemen in carriages and assure them that their coachmen were better bred than they because they behaved respectfully toward the women and did not half kill them with their diabolical tricks and suggestions.  The way in which smart people sprawled head over heels into all the cesspools of vice still caused Nana some surprise, for she had a few prejudices remaining, though Satin was rapidly destroying them.

“Well then,” she used to say when talking seriously about the matter, “there’s no such thing as virtue left, is there?”