Along the covered way women were now selling hot soup and coffee.  At one corner of the foot-pavement a large circle of customers clustered round a vendor of cabbage soup.  The bright tin caldron, full of broth, was steaming over a little low stove, through the holes of which came the pale glow of the embers.  From a napkin-lined basket the woman took some thin slices of bread and dropped them into yellow cups; then with a ladle she filled the cups with liquor.  Around her were saleswomen neatly dressed, market gardeners in blouses, porters with coats soiled by the loads they had carried, poor ragged vagabonds—­in fact, all the early hungry ones of the markets, eating, and scalding their mouths, and drawing back their chins to avoid soiling them with the drippings from their spoons.  The delighted artist blinked, and sought a point of view so as to get a good ensemble of the picture.  That cabbage soup, however, exhaled a very strong odour.  Florent, for his part, turned his head away, distressed by the sight of the full cups which the customers emptied in silence, glancing around them the while like suspicious animals.  As the woman began serving a fresh customer, Claude himself was affected by the odorous steam of the soup, which was wafted full in his face.

He again tightened his sash, half amused and half annoyed.  Then resuming his walk, and alluding to the punch paid for by Alexandre, he said to Florent in a low voice: 

“It’s very odd, but have you ever noticed that although a man can always find somebody to treat him to something to drink, he can never find a soul who will stand him anything to eat?”

The dawn was now rising.  The houses on the Boulevard de Sebastopol at the end of the Rue de la Cossonnerie were still black; but above the sharp line of their slate roofs a patch of pale blue sky, circumscribed by the arch-pieces of the covered way, showed like a gleaming half-moon.  Claude, who had been bending over some grated openings on a level with the ground, through which a glimpse could be obtained of deep cellars where gas lights glimmered, now glanced up into the air between the lofty pillars, as though scanning the dark roofs which fringed the clear sky.  Then he halted again, with his eyes fixed on one of the light iron ladders which connect the superposed market roofs and give access from one to the other.  Florent asked him what he was seeking there.

“I’m looking for that scamp of a Marjolin,” replied the artist.  “He’s sure to be in some guttering up there, unless, indeed, he’s been spending the night in the poultry cellars.  I want him to give me a sitting.”