Before the night is out, these women will have their strength, their restrained passions--and their money. For your sailormen pay well on the day of their return, and over and above what they give, there is what one may take afterwards, when by good luck they are quite drunk. They look about them undecided, almost bewildered, drunk already merely from finding themselves on shore. Where should they go? How should they begin their pleasures? This wind, this cold rain of winter and this sinister fall of the night--for those who have a home, a fireside, all that adds to the joy of the return. To these poor fellows it brought the need for a shelter, for somewhere where they could warm themselves; but they were without a home, these returning exiles. At first they wandered at hazard, linked arm in arm, laughing at nothing, at everything, walking obliquely from right and left--with the movements of captive beasts which have just been set free. Then they entered _À la Descente des Navires_, presided over by Madame Creachcadec. _À la Descente des Navires_ was a low tavern in the Rue de Siam. The warm atmosphere savoured of alcohol. There was a coal fire in a brazier, and Yves sat down in front of it. This was the first time, for two or three years past, that he had sat in a chair. And a real fire! How he revelled in the quite unusual luxury of drying himself before glowing coals. On board ship, there was never a chance of it; not even in the great cold of Cape Horn or of Iceland; not even in the persistent, penetrating rains of the high latitudes were they ever able to dry themselves. For days and nights on end, they remained wet through; doing their best to keep on the move, until the sun should shine. She was a real mother to the sailors, was this Madame Creachcadec; all who knew her could vouch for it. And she was very exact, too, in the prices she charged for their dinners and their feastings. Besides, she knew them. Her large red face flushed already with alcohol, she tried to repeat their names, which she heard them saying among themselves; she remembered quite well having seen them when they were boatmen on board the _Bretagne_; she even thought she could recall their boyhood, when they were ship-boys on the _Inflexible._ But what tall, fine fellows they had grown since those days! Truly it was only an eye like hers that could recognize them, altered as they were. . . . And, at the back of the tavern, the dinner was cooking, on stoves which already sent out an appetising odour of soup. From the street came sounds of a great uproar. A band of sailors was approaching, singing, scanning at the top of their voices, to a frivolous air, these words of the Church: '_Kyrie Christe, Dominum nostrum; Kyrie eleison_. . . . They entered, upsetting the chairs, and at the same time a gust of wind laid low the flame of the lamps.