Mademoiselle Saget was a regular frequenter of the Square des Innocents.  Every afternoon she would spend a good hour there to keep herself well posted in the gossip of the common people.  On either side there is a long crescent of benches placed end to end; and on these the poor folks who stifle in the hovels of the neighbouring narrow streets assemble in crowds.  There are withered, chilly-looking old women in tumbled caps, and young ones in loose jackets and carelessly fastened skirts, with bare heads and tired, faded faces, eloquent of the wretchedness of their lives.  There are some men also:  tidy old buffers, porters in greasy jackets, and equivocal-looking individuals in black silk hats, while the foot-path is overrun by a swarm of youngsters dragging toy carts without wheels about, filling pails with sand, and screaming and fighting; a dreadful crew, with ragged clothes and dirty noses, teeming in the sunshine like vermin.

Mademoiselle Saget was so slight and thin that she always managed to insinuate herself into a place on one of the benches.  She listened to what was being said, and started a conversation with her neighbour, some sallow-faced workingman’s wife, who sat mending linen, from time to time producing handkerchiefs and stockings riddled with holes from a little basket patched up with string.  Moreover, Mademoiselle Saget had plenty of acquaintances here.  Amidst the excruciating squalling of the children, and the ceaseless rumble of the traffic in the Rue Saint Denis, she took part in no end of gossip, everlasting tales about the tradesmen of the neighbourhood, the grocers, the butchers, and the bakers, enough, indeed, to fill the columns of a local paper, and the whole envenomed by refusals of credit and covert envy, such as is always harboured by the poor.  From these wretched creatures she also obtained the most disgusting revelations, the gossip of low lodging-houses and doorkeepers’ black-holes, all the filthy scandal of the neighbourhood, which tickled her inquisitive appetite like hot spice.

As she sat with her face turned towards the markets, she had immediately in front of her the square and its three blocks of houses, into the windows of which her eyes tried to pry.  She seemed to gradually rise and traverse the successive floors right up to the garret skylights.  She stared at the curtains; based an entire drama on the appearance of a head between two shutters; and, by simply gazing at the facades, ended by knowing the history of all the dwellers in these houses.  The Baratte Restaurant, with its wine shop, its gilt wrought-iron marquise, forming a sort of terrace whence peeped the foliage of a few plants in flower-pots, and its four low storeys, all painted and decorated, had an especial interest for her.  She gazed at its yellow columns standing out against a background of tender blue, at the whole of its imitation temple-front daubed on the facade of a decrepit, tumble-down house, crowned at the summit by a parapet of painted zinc.  Behind the red-striped window-blinds she espied visions of nice little lunches, delicate suppers, and uproarious, unlimited orgies.  And she did not hesitate to invent lies about the place.  It was there, she declared, that Florent came to gorge with those two hussies, the Mehudins, on whom he lavished his money.