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her veins, a right minx who’d been running after men since the first stirrings of puberty.
    Old Ma Teston had worked at Débonnaire & Co. for more than thirty years. The other three had bawled and suckled there, while their mothers wiped them with one hand and folded reams of paper with the other. In addition to these four workers, about twenty other women, girls and little misses, would assemble at seven o’clock in the morning along the tables and leave, according to the season or the greater or lesser pressure of work, at six, seven, or even eight o’clock in the evening.
    These twenty girls, renewing themselves every couple of weeks, formed part of that nomadic population, that coterie of female bookbinders, that strange sisterhood who vie with each other in screaming the most frightful insults, who pour abuse by the bucket-load over one another’s heads; a very curious race of girls who rarely look for relationships outside their own class, who are never truly aroused except by the whiff of wine-soaked breath; a bunch of female reprobates, hatched for the most part in some slum, who by the age of fourteen have already slaked the maiden fires of their flesh behind the wall of the abattoir or down some dark alleyway.
    They all hated one another – though all, men and women alike, were as thick as thieves when it came to making fun of the supervisors – and once outside the workshop they communicated only by trading scratches with fingernails and slaps with the back of the hand. In the morning, when they arrived, there were screams of delight, wild frolics, and delirious joy at the sight of some woman coming in, painfully dragging her backside to her place or blinking her black and blue, kohl-smeared eyelids; but if the boss, exasperated at seeing some huge brute, drunk as a Pole, bouncing from one pile of papers to another, fired him and paid him off then and there, it didn’t stop the woman he was honouring with his kicks and his kisses from getting up and leaving, and taking with her a whole gang who sided with her. Then there’d be boos from the other workers, followed by the tearful laments of the more worldly-wise women: ‘She’s stupid to go after a man who beats her. If it was me, I’d be off like a shot.’ And the same women would turn up the next day with black eyes or cuts on their faces and would energetically defend their man, while the others called him a bully and a coward. And so the gossip and the stories rained down. So and so was running around like a bitch in heat after a man who didn’t really care about her, snivelling all day long over her work, and had ended up tearing out the hair of a fellow worker who was dishonest enough to have taken her lover and provocative enough to confront her with it. With all this tittle-tattle fanned by stupidity, with all this hatred that burst into flame on contact with men, it was a miracle if, at the end of a few days, ten or twelve of the same women still remained. The sieve of Débonnaire & Co. never got clogged up, and its male and female personnel splashed and trickled like a stream of dirty water through the holes of its doors.
    ‘Idlers,’ said the foreman, self-righteously, a weedy-looking man, ugly as sin, with his livid face pitted by smallpox and tufts of eyebrows sprouting over sunken eyes that swivelled milkily in red eyelids. ‘Hussies,’ sighed the supervisor, a tall angular woman, with brown eyes like apple pips and a mouth barred with formidable fangs; but the idlers and the hussies took no notice of them. On Mondays the workshop was empty; on Tuesdays the workshop was equally empty; on Wednesdays the workshop began to fill up, and by Saturday to empty again. Apart from the supervisors, who were looking after their pennies, and a poor old man who’d drunk so much in his youth he’d got a dicky stomach and could no longer drink, all the rest only worked, if they were women, in order to stuff themselves with chips and buy imitation