This Sunday crowd consisted of inebriated sailors singing, of soldiers who stumbled, making with their sabres a clatter of steel, of people of the lower class adrift--workers of the town looking drawn and miserable; women in little merino shawls and pointed muslin head-dresses, who walked along with shining eyes and reddened cheek bones, exhaling an odour of brandy; of old men and old women in a disgusting state of drunkenness, who had fallen and been picked up, and were lurching forward, on their way, with backs covered with mud. The rain continued to fall, wetting everything, the silver-buckled hats of the Bretons, the tilted bonnets of the sailors, the laced shakos and the white head-dresses, and the umbrellas. There was something so wan, so dead, about the air, that it was difficult to imagine that there could be anywhere a sun . . . the notion of it had gone. There was a feeling that you were imprisoned under layers and thicknesses of dense, humid clouds which were deluging you. It did not seem that they would ever be able to break, or that behind them there could be a sky. You breathed water. You were no longer conscious of the hour, and knew not whether the darkness was the darkness of all this rain or whether the real winter's night was closing in. The sailors brought into the streets a certain rather surprising note of gaiety and youth, with their cheery faces and their songs, with their large bright collars and their red pompoms standing out in sharp contrast with the navy blue of their uniform. They went and came from one tavern to another, jostling the crowd, saying things which had no sense but which made them laugh. And sometimes they stopped on the footpath, before the stalls of the shops where were retailed the hundred and one things they needed for their use: red handkerchiefs, in the middle of which were imprinted designs of famous ships, _Bretagne, Triomphante, Devastation_; ribbons for their bonnets with handsome inscriptions in gold; cords of complicated workmanship destined to close securely those canvas sacks which they have on board for storing their kit; elegant attachments in plaited thread for suspending from the neck of the topmen their large knives; silver whistles for the petty-officers, and finally, red belts and little combs and little mirrors. From time to time came heavy squalls which sent bonnets flying and made the drunken passers-by stagger. And then the rain came down more heavily, more torrentially, and whipped like hail. The crowd of sailors steadily increased. They could be seen coming on in groups at the end of the Rue de Siam; they ascended from the port and from the lower town by the great granite stairways, and spread singing into the streets.