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jewellery, or if they were men, to pour glasses of white wine down their necks in the morning and guzzle bottles of cheap red wine in the afternoon.
    Such was the personnel of the firm which, for the night shift, would recruit another pile of women picked up from the gates of other binderies. Ah, the supervisor had her hands full on those long nights; first she had to dole out the work. ‘Oh, thanks a lot!’ the girls would complain, ‘it’s slave labour, that’s what that is! What a job! I’ll break my nails on that paper!’And then she had to quench their thirsts and give coffee and brandy to everyone; she had to prevent them scratching each other’s eyes out and slapping each other’s faces; and she had to register the work done, piece by piece, the firm’s full-time workers wanting to be checked out ahead of the riff-raff rounded up that evening, the latter protesting that they were being picked on and that they’d teach them not to take them for botchers and bunglers!
    So when these dregs had been swept outside, the supervisor let out a sigh of relief, adjusted the straps of her frilly bonnet, adroitly removed the sleep that was encrusting her eyes, pushed her little bench under the table with her foot, and made her way briskly towards the boss’s office.
    She stopped in surprise. Céline and Désirée were arguing furiously with him. Désirée was asking to be no longer paid piecework, but by the hour instead. ‘So,’ said the supervisor, ‘you want to be like me then.’ But Céline, who was a bit lippy, replied: ‘Eh, and why not? My sister’s not a labourer only good for folding pages, she can do the delicate jobs like stitching, and what’s more Monsieur put me on an hourly wage last week, so why shouldn’t he give my sister the same salary as me?’ After a lengthy discussion it was decided that, from then on, Désirée would get twenty-five and a half centimes an hour. The girls, delighted, bade them goodnight, waving behind their backs as they went out to wash at the pump, and then, jostling each other and jumping about in the courtyard to warm up, walked back up the Rue du Dragon towards the Rue de Vaugirard.
    Désirée, in a daze, was dragging her feet and stopping in front of all the shop windows; the other, inured by dissipated nights to the stomach’s early morning hunger pangs and to a cold that chilled you to the marrow and made you hunch your shoulders and hasten your steps, would shout at her sister, calling her a good-for-nothing slacker.
    The Rue de Sèvres stretched out interminably with its religious communities, its abbeys, its hospices for the sick, and its boarding schools for girls, but what slowed the younger girl’s pace wasn’t the squadron of cripples and beggars groaning pitifully, caps outstretched, as the church filled up, nor was it that starving rabble who, arms in slings and legs swaddled in bandages, gathered, drunk and paralysed with cold, in front of the tiny entrance to the Hospital Sisters of Saint-Thomas de Villeneuve, it was those numerous devotional shops, those innumerable sellers of cheap religious souvenirs, of which the street is full.
    Near the Jesuit seminary, where the coachmen’s horses pranced, and where, dismounted from their seats, liveried flunkies assumed the mawkish poses of the pious poor, there were painted statues of the Virgin, sombre Madonnas suitable for putting in niches, Christs as large as life, with dashes of lilac on their chests and carmine-red on their hands, beneficent Jesuses, curly-haired and blond, arms outstretched, welcoming and well-groomed, then, on the lower shelves, monstrances, patens and ciboriums gleaming with their gilt and inlay work, strange vigil lights with hearts of red glass mounted on bronze, or in the form of lilies with pistils and stems of copper, vases with the initials J. and M. interlaced, and, piled up on a partition, bouquets of white paper roses framing a tiny redeemer made of pink wax, who wriggled