The cellar under the butter market is a very gloomy spot.  The rows of storerooms are protected by a very fine wire meshing, as a safeguard against fire; and the gas jets, which are very few and far between, glimmer like yellow splotches destitute of radiance in the heavy, malordorous atmosphere beneath the low vault.  Madame Lecoeur, however, was at work on her butter at one of the tables placed parallel with the Rue Berger, and here a pale light filtered through the vent-holes.  The tables, which are continually sluiced with a flood of water from the taps, are as white as though they were quite new.  With her back turned to the pump in the rear, Madame Lecoeur was kneading her butter in a kind of oak box.  She took some of different sorts which lay beside her, and mixed the varieties together, correcting one by another, just as is done in the blending of wines.  Bent almost double, and showing sharp, bony shoulders, and arms bared to the elbows, as scraggy and knotted as pea-rods, she dug her fists into the greasy paste in front of her, which was assuming a whitish and chalky appearance.  It was trying work, and she heaved a sigh at each fresh effort.

“Mademoiselle Saget wants to speak to you, aunt,” said La Sarriette.

Madame Lecoeur stopped her work, and pulled her cap over her hair with her greasy fingers, seemingly quite careless of staining it.  “I’ve nearly finished.  Ask her to wait a moment,” she said.

“She’s got something very particular to tell you,” continued La Sarriette.

“I won’t be more than a minute, my dear.”

Then she again plunged her arms into the butter, which buried them up to the elbows.  Previously softened in warm water, it covered Madame Lecoeur’s parchment-like skin as with an oily film, and threw the big purple veins that streaked her flesh into strong relief.  La Sarriette was quite disgusted by the sight of those hideous arms working so frantically amidst the melting mass.  However, she could recall the time when her own pretty little hands had manipulated the butter for whole afternoons at a time.  It had even been a sort of almond-paste to her, a cosmetic which had kept her skin white and her nails delicately pink; and even now her slender fingers retained the suppleness it had endowed them with.

“I don’t think that butter of yours will be very good, aunt,” she continued, after a pause.  “Some of the sorts seem much too strong.”

“I’m quite aware of that,” replied Madame Lecoeur, between a couple of groans.  “But what can I do?  I must use everything up.  There are some folks who insist upon having butter cheap, and so cheap butter must be made for them.  Oh! it’s always quite good enough for those who buy it.”

La Sarriette reflected that she would hardly care to eat butter which had been worked by her aunt’s arms.  Then she glanced at a little jar full of a sort of reddish dye.  “Your colouring is too pale,” she said.