Whenever a man crossed the court, flutelike laugher would arise, and then starched skirts would rustle like the passing of a gust of wind.
The games were only an excuse for them to make their escape.
Suddenly stillness fell upon the tenement.
The girls had glided out into the street and made for the outer Boulevards.
Then, linked arm-in-arm across the full breadth of the pavement, they went off, the whole six of them, clad in light colors, with ribbons tied around their bare heads.
With bright eyes darting stealthy glances through their partially closed eyelids, they took note of everything, and constantly threw back their necks to laugh, displaying the fleshy part of their chins.
They would swing their hips, or group together tightly, or flaunt along with awkward grace, all for the purpose of calling attention to the fact that their forms were filling out.
Nana was in the centre with her pink dress all aglow in the sunlight.
She gave her arm to Pauline, whose costume, yellow flowers on a white ground, glared in similar fashion, dotted as it were with little flames.
As they were the tallest of the band, the most woman-like and most unblushing, they led the troop and drew themselves up with breasts well forward whenever they detected glances or heard complimentary remarks.
The others extended right and left, puffing themselves out in order to attract attention.
Nana and Pauline resorted to the complicated devices of experienced coquettes.
If they ran till they were out of breath, it was in view of showing their white stockings and making the ribbons of their chignons wave in the breeze.
When they stopped, pretending complete breathlessness, you would certainly spot someone they knew quite near, one of the young fellows of the neighborhood. This would make them dawdle along languidly, whispering and laughing among themselves, but keeping a sharp watch through their downcast eyelids.
They went on these strolls of a Sunday mainly for the sake of these chance meetings.
Tall lads, wearing their Sunday best, would stop them, joking and trying to catch them round their waists.
Pauline was forever running into one of Madame Gaudron’s sons, a seventeen-year-old carpenter, who would treat her to fried potatoes.
Nana could spot Victor Fauconnier, the laundress’s son and they would exchange kisses in dark corners.
It never went farther than that, but they told each other some tall tales.
Then when the sun set, the great delight of these young hussies was to stop and look at the mountebanks.
Conjurors and strong men turned up and spread threadbare carpets on the soil of the avenue.
Loungers collected and a circle formed whilst the mountebank in the centre tried his muscles under his faded tights.
Nana and Pauline would stand for hours in the thickest part of the crowd.
Their pretty, fresh frocks would get crushed between great-coats and dirty work smocks.
In this atmosphere of wine and sweat they would laugh gaily, finding amusement in everything, blooming naturally like roses growing out of a dunghill.
The only thing that vexed them was to meet their fathers, especially when the hatter had been drinking.
So they watched and warned one another.
“Look, Nana,” Pauline would suddenly cry out, “here comes father Coupeau!”
“Well, he’s drunk too. Oh, dear,” said Nana, greatly bothered.
“I’m going to beat it, you know. I don’t want him to give me a wallop. Hullo!
How he stumbles!
Good Lord, if he could only break his neck!”
At other times, when Coupeau came straight up to her without giving her time to run off, she crouched down, made herself small and muttered:
“Just you hide me, you others.
He’s looking for me, and he promised he’d knock my head off if he caught me hanging about.”
Then when the drunkard had passed them she drew herself up again, and all the others followed her with bursts of laughter.
He’ll find her — he will — he won’t!
It was a true game of hide and seek.
One day, however, Boche had come after Pauline and caught her by both ears, and Coupeau had driven Nana home with kicks.
Nana was now a flower-maker and earned forty sous a day at Titreville’s place in the Rue du Caire, where she had served as apprentice.
The Coupeaus had kept her there so that she might remain under the eye of Madame Lerat, who had been forewoman in the workroom for ten years.
Of a morning, when her mother looked at the cuckoo clock, off she went by herself, looking very pretty with her shoulders tightly confined in her old black dress, which was both too narrow and too short; and Madame Lerat had to note the hour of her arrival and tell it to Gervaise.
She was allowed twenty minutes to go from the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or to the Rue du Caire, and it was enough, for these young hussies have the legs of racehorses.
Sometimes she arrived exactly on time but so breathless and flushed that she must have covered most of the distance at a run after dawdling along the way.
More often she was a few minutes late. Then she would fawn on her aunt all day, hoping to soften her and keep her from telling.
Madame Lerat understood what it was to be young and would lie to the Coupeaus, but she also lectured Nana, stressing the dangers a young girl runs on the streets of Paris.
Mon Dieu! she herself was followed often enough!
“Oh! I watch, you needn’t fear,” said the widow to the Coupeaus.
“I will answer to you for her as I would for myself.
And rather than let a blackguard squeeze her, why I’d step between them.”