The working girls now filled the boulevard: metal polishers, milliners,
flower sellers, shivering in their thin clothing. In small groups they
chattered gaily, laughing and glancing here and there. Occasionally
there would be one girl by herself, thin, pale, serious-faced, picking
her way along the city wall among the puddles and the filth.

After the working girls, the office clerks came past, breathing upon
their chilled fingers and munching penny rolls. Some of them are gaunt
young fellows in ill-fitting suits, their tired eyes still fogged from
sleep. Others are older men, stooped and tottering, with faces pale and
drawn from long hours of office work and glancing nervously at their
watches for fear of arriving late.

In time the Boulevards settle into their usual morning quiet. Old folks
come out to stroll in the sun. Tired young mothers in bedraggled
skirts cuddle babies in their arms or sit on a bench to change diapers.
Children run, squealing and laughing, pushing and shoving.

Then Gervaise felt herself choking, dizzy with anguish, all hopes gone;
it seemed to her that everything was ended, even time itself, and that
Lantier would return no more. Her eyes vacantly wandered from the old
slaughter-house, foul with butchery and with stench, to the new white
hospital which, through the yawning openings of its ranges of windows,
disclosed the naked wards, where death was preparing to mow. In front of
her on the other side of the octroi wall the bright heavens dazzled her,
with the rising sun which rose higher and higher over the vast awaking
city.

The young woman was seated on a chair, no longer crying, and with her