From morn till night he was ever
prowling about, scolding and terrorizing those dirty, ill-behaved, and
often lying and thieving women. The building, a dilapidated private
house, with a damp ground floor, to which alone clients were admitted,
had two upper stories, each comprising six rooms arranged as dormitories,
in which the nurses and their infants slept. There was no end to the
arrivals and departures there: the peasant women were ever galloping
through the place, dragging trunks about, carrying babes in swaddling
clothes, and filling the rooms and the passages with wild cries and vile
odors. And amid all this the house had another inmate, Mademoiselle
Broquette, Herminie as she was called, a long, pale, bloodless girl of
fifteen, who mooned about languidly among that swarm of sturdy young
women.
Boutan, who knew the house well, went in, followed by Mathieu. The
central passage, which was fairly broad, ended in a glass door, which
admitted one to a kind of courtyard, where a sickly conifer stood on a
round patch of grass, which the dampness rotted. On the right of the
passage was the office, whither Madame Broquette, at the request of her
customers, summoned the nurses, who waited in a neighboring room, which
was simply furnished with a greasy deal table in the centre.
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