street through the back gate, in her rags, her dirt, and her mendicancy, like some belated bug attracted from the distant swamps to the gaslight.
They began to joke her in a rough, good-natured way.
"Hé! but, Nourrice, you love balls still?"
"Like old times, hein, Nourrice?"
"You could show them how to dance, Nourrice?"
"Who used to run off to the balls at night, Nourrice?" for they all knew her,—a character famous for escapades in the old times.
But the old woman paid as little attention to them as if she had not heard them. The lips of her sunken mouth, into which all the wrinkles of her face converged, were glued together; and so the comments resumed their way without regard to her.
"Whom is she dancing with there,—that little Mamzelle of the Goupilleaus?"
"Eh! but she's not pretty!"
"Not pretty? Mamzelle Motte not pretty? Ah, par exemple!" Marcélite's voice took another tone from that in which she had criticised others.
