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on straw, trapped, as if he were an old woman’s plaything, beneath a dome of glass.
    And all these shops receded into the distance, diminishing in splendour the closer the street got to the Boulevard des Invalides.
    Here and there, alternating with them, gaping onto the pavement, were bars with varnished winebarrels along the walls and crimson grilles on their windows. At this hour they were teeming with people. Drunks, elbows on zinc counters, eyes bleary and teeth empurpled by cheap wine, were laughing right under the girls’ noses. Céline flounced her skirt and flashed her eyes; turning round, she called to her sister who was daydreaming in front of a herbalist’s window, looking in wonder at amber necklaces, enemas with their red hoses, rubber teats, buffalo-horn combs, powder-puffs, and tiny soft sponges shaped like almonds, her finger pointing out shaving brushes and elastic suspenders to the other girl, who just pouted. ‘Them, they’re for men!’ said Céline, who began walking again, but her sister was dawdling further and further behind, gawping now in front of a stuffed Puss-in-Boots in a shoe shop, idling in front of the door of a washhouse adorned with a tricolour flag made of zinc, standing amazed before the windows of clothes shops in which hung velveteen trousers at eight francs, complete kids’ outfits with cardboard labels: ‘The Little Rascal’, ‘The Sailor Boy’, and ‘The Milk Maid’, red tool-belts for carpenters, striped percalines, surah silks woven in the Batignolles, starched shirts, and cravats patterned with wavy lines and polka dots.
    ‘Oh, what beautiful blouses,’ sighed Désirée, ‘that fluting is so dainty.’
    ‘Yes, go on, look…those aren’t for the likes of us, my girl; and to think there are women no better than me who can put them on their backs, and not just on Sundays, but every day the good Lord made! And if that’s not enough to make you mad, while we’re slaving away, tarts like Gamel’s daughter are stuffing down oysters and draping themselves in lace. And what’s more she’s ugly, that slut; and she doesn’t do anything, she just sleeps and drinks and stuffs her face and has a laugh! It makes you want to pack it in, when all’s said and done. Are you coming? What are you muttering about…that I should do as she does? Certainly, if I wanted to I could do the same as her…’
    ‘And don’t I know it, don’t I know it,’ said Désirée, ‘look, leave me alone, you’re hurting me with your nails, and anyway I don’t know why you’re mad at Virginia, she paid for all those glasses of mulled wine you had last summer.’
    ‘What? I’m fed up with her mulled wine!’ shouted Céline, exasperated; then her anger changed course and she suddenly turned on a delivery boy who, without meaning to, knocked his basket against her hair, and she shouted harshly at him, while the errand boy, after having retreated to a safe distance, taunted her, patting his thigh with his hand flat, then in a fist, his thumb sticking out.
    Nevertheless, she decided to continue on her way, but Désirée was dragging her heels along the pavement, even stopping again in front of a shop selling consecrated candles, pointing with her podgy finger, which left dirty marks on the glass, at wax tapers, fluted, flared, plain or wrapped in paper printed with fleur-de-lys, at ‘rat’s tail’ candle-holders with pale corkscrewed candles in them, at pure sanctuary incense with instructions for use written on the box; she would just stand there half asleep, or, turning around, she’d gaze uncomprehendingly at the line of cabs, at the trees in the square with their peeling bark, at the shops of the Bon Marché enveloped in the distance by a dusty blue haze. Céline stamped her feet in anger. ‘Anatole’s going to give me what for,’ she’d say to her, ‘I’m begging you, pull yourself together and come on!’
    They trotted on wearily, and along the way the religious images started