A fine drizzle had begun to fall; and the wait went on again as if it
would never finish. But an unexpected meeting gave them momentary
occupation. A shadowy form, something which seemed to be a thin,
black-skirted woman, brushed against them. And all of a sudden they were
surprised to find it was a priest.

"What, is it you, Monsieur l'Abbe Froment?" exclaimed Gerard. "At this
time of night? And in this part of Paris?"

Thereupon Pierre, without venturing either to express his own
astonishment at finding them there themselves, or to ask them what they
were doing, explained that he had been belated through accompanying Abbe
Rose on a visit to a night refuge. Ah! to think of all the frightful want
which at last drifted to those pestilential dormitories where the stench
had almost made him faint! To think of all the weariness and despair
which there sank into the slumber of utter prostration, like that of
beasts falling to the ground to sleep off the abominations of life! No
name could be given to the promiscuity; poverty and suffering were there
in heaps, children and men, young and old, beggars in sordid rags, beside
the shameful poor in threadbare frock-coats, all the waifs and strays of
the daily shipwrecks of Paris life, all the laziness and vice, and
ill-luck and injustice which the torrent rolls on, and throws off like
scum. Some slept on, quite annihilated, with the faces of corpses.
Others, lying on their backs with mouths agape, snored loudly as if still
venting the plaint of their sorry life. And others tossed restlessly,
still struggling in their slumber against fatigue and cold and hunger,
which pursued them like nightmares of monstrous shape. And from all those
human beings, stretched there like wounded after a battle, from all that
ambulance of life reeking with a stench of rottenness and death, there