Salope! »
The woman on the third floor: « Vache
! »
Thereupon a whole variegated chorus of yells, as
windows were flung open on every side and half the
street joined in the quarrel. They shut up abruptly ten
minutes later, when a squadron of cavalry rode past and
people stopped shouting to look at them.
I sketch this scene, just to convey something of the
spirit of the Rue du Coq d'Or. Not that quarrels were the
only thing that happened there-but still, we seldom got
through the morning without at least one outburst of
this description. Quarrels, and the desolate cries of
street hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing
orange-peel over the cobbles, and at night loud singing
and the sour reek of the refuse-carts, made up the
atmosphere of the street.
It was a very narrow street-a ravine of tall, leprous
houses, lurching towards one another in queer atti-
tudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of
collapse. All the houses were hotels and packed to the
tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians. At 5
the foot of the hotels were tiny bistros, where you could be
drunk for the equivalent of a shilling. On Saturday nights
about a third of the male population of the quarter was
drunk. There was fighting over women, and the Arab
navvies who lived in the cheapest hotels used to conduct
mysterious feuds, and fight them out with chairs and
occasionally revolvers.