At the upper end of the _Rue de Rennes_, beside a plot of waste
and, was a stall where an old woman sold dusty ginger-bread and
sticks of stale barley-sugar. She had a face the colour of brick
dust under a striped cotton sun-bonnet, and eyes of a pale,
steely blue. Her whole stock-in-trade had not cost a couple of
francs, and on windy days the white dust from houses building
in the neighbourhood covered it like a coat of whitewash. Nurses
and mothers would anxiously pull away their little ones who were
casting sheep's eyes at the sweetstuff:

"Dirty!" they would say dissuasively; "dirty!"

But the woman never seemed to hear; perhaps she was past feeling
anything. She did not beg. Mademoiselle Servien used to bid her
good-day in passing, address her by name and fall into talk with
her before the stall, sometimes for a quarter of an hour at a
time. The staple of conversation with them both was the neighbours,
accidents that had occurred in the public thoroughfares, cases
of coachmen ill-using their horses, the troubles and trials of
life and the ways of Providence, "which are not always just."

Jean happened to be present at one of these colloquies. He was
a plebeian himself, and this glimpse of the petty lives of the
poor, this peep into sordid existences of idle sloth and spiritless
resignation, stirred all the blood in his veins. In an instant,
as he stood between the two old crones, with their drab faces
and no outlook on life save that of the streets, now gloomy and
empty, now full of sunshine and crowded traffic, the young man
learned more of human conditions than he had ever been taught