lofty staircase, which one evening when he had seen it before had been bathed in gas fumes and loud with the footsteps of women scampering over the different floors.  He felt that the dressing rooms were empty, the corridors deserted; not a soul was there; not a sound broke the stillness, while through the square windows on the level of the stairs the pale November sunlight filtered and cast yellow patches of light, full of dancing dust, amid the dead, peaceful air which seemed to descend from the regions above.

He was glad of this calm and the silence, and he went slowly up, trying to regain breath as he went, for his heart was thumping, and he was afraid lest he might behave childishly and give way to sighs and tears.  Accordingly on the first-floor landing he leaned up against a wall—­for he was sure of not being observed—­and pressed his handkerchief to his mouth and gazed at the warped steps, the iron balustrade bright with the friction of many hands, the scraped paint on the walls—­all the squalor, in fact, which that house of tolerance so crudely displayed at the pale afternoon hour when courtesans are asleep.  When he reached the second floor he had to step over a big yellow cat which was lying curled up on a step.  With half-closed eyes this cat was keeping solitary watch over the house, where the close and now frozen odors which the women nightly left behind them had rendered him somnolent.

In the right-hand corridor the door of the dressing room had, indeed, not been closed entirely.  Nana was waiting.  That little Mathilde, a drab of a young girl, kept her dressing room in a filthy state.  Chipped jugs stood about anyhow; the dressing table was greasy, and there was a chair covered with red stains, which looked as if someone had bled over the straw.  The paper pasted on walls and ceiling was splashed from top to bottom with spots of soapy water and this smelled so disagreeably of lavender scent turned sour that Nana opened the window and for some moments stayed leaning on the sill, breathing the fresh air and craning forward to catch sight of Mme Bron underneath.  She could hear her broom wildly at work on the mildewed pantiles of the narrow court which was buried in shadow.  A canary, whose cage hung on a shutter, was trilling away piercingly.  The sound of carriages in the boulevard and neighboring streets was no longer audible, and the quiet and the wide expanse of sleeping sunlight suggested the country.  Looking farther afield, her eye fell on the small buildings and glass roofs of the galleries in the passage and, beyond these, on the tall houses in the Rue Vivienne, the backs of which rose silent and apparently deserted over against her.  There was a succession of terrace roofs close by, and on one of these a photographer had perched a big cagelike construction of blue glass.  It was all very gay, and Nana was becoming absorbed in contemplation, when it struck her someone had knocked at the door.