In the wide square in front of the hotel, brilliantly lighted with
torches and with gas, a great crowd of people had gathered. Not
only passers-by who had stopped to look on, but more especially
workmen, loafers, poor women, and ladies of questionable
appearance, stood in serried ranks on both sides of the row of
carriages. Humorous remarks and coarse witticisms in the vulgarest
Parisian dialect hailed down upon the passing carriages and their
occupants.

She heard words which she had not heard for many years, and she
blushed at the thought that she was perhaps the only one in this
whole long line of carriages who understood these low expressions
of the dregs of Paris.

She began to look at the faces around her: it seemed to her as if
she knew them all. She knew what they thought, what was passing in
each of these tightly-packed heads; and little by little a host of
memories streamed in upon her. She fought against them as well as
she could, but she was not herself this evening.

She had not, then, lost the key to the secret drawer; reluctantly
she drew it out, and the memories overpowered her.

She remembered how often she herself, still almost a child, had
devoured with greedy eyes the fine ladies who drove in splendor to
balls or theatres; how often she had cried in bitter envy over the
flowers she laboriously pieced together to make others beautiful.
Here she saw the same greedy eyes, the same inextinguishable,
savage envy.