confectionery.  Poor starving wretches, scantily-paid clerks, and women shivering with fever were to be seen crowding around, and the street lads occasionally amused themselves by hooting the pale-faced individuals, known to be misers, who only made their purchases after slyly glancing about them to see that they were not observed.[*] Mademoiselle Saget wriggled her way to a stall, the keeper of which boasted that the scraps she sold came exclusively from the Tuileries.  One day, indeed, she had induced the old maid to buy a slice of leg of mutton by informing that it had come from the plate of the Emperor himself; and this slice of mutton, eaten with no little pride, had been a soothing consolation to Mademoiselle Saget’s vanity.  The wariness of her approach to the stall was, moreover, solely caused by her desire to keep well with the neighbouring shop people, whose premises she was eternally haunting without ever buying anything.  Her usual tactics were to quarrel with them as soon as she had managed to learn their histories, when she would bestow her patronage upon a fresh set, desert it in due course, and then gradually make friends again with those with whom she had quarrelled.  In this way she made the complete circuit of the market neighbourhood, ferreting about in every shop and stall.  Anyone would have imagined that she consumed an enormous amount of provisions, whereas, in point of fact, she lived solely upon presents and the few scraps which she was compelled to buy when people were not in the giving vein.

[*] The dealers in these scraps are called bijoutiers, or jewellers, whilst the scraps themselves are known as harlequins, the idea being that they are of all colours and shapes when mingled together, thus suggesting harlequin’s variegated attire.—­Translator.

On that particular evening there was only a tall old man standing in front of the stall.  He was sniffing at a plate containing a mixture of meat and fish.  Mademoiselle Saget, in her turn, began to sniff at a plate of cold fried fish.  The price of it was three sous, but, by dint of bargaining, she got it for two.  The cold fish then vanished into the bag.  Other customers now arrived, and with a uniform impulse lowered their noses over the plates.  The smell of the stall was very disgusting, suggestive alike of greasy dishes and a dirty sink.[*]

[*] Particulars of the strange and repulsive trade in harlequins, which even nowadays is not extinct, will be found in Privat d’Anglemont’s well-known book Paris Anecdote, written at the very period with which M. Zola deals in the present work.  My father, Henry Vizetelly, also gave some account of it in his Glances Back through Seventy Years, in a chapter describing the odd ways in which certain Parisians contrive to get a living.—­Translator.

“Come and see me to-morrow,” the stallkeeper called out to the old maid, “and I’ll put something nice on one side for you.  There’s going to be a grand dinner at the Tuileries to-night.”