She did the menial work, she kept the shop, she served the customers. Madame Jupillon rested everything upon her shoulders; and while the good-natured girl was working and perspiring, the bulky matron, assuming the majestic, leisurely air of an annuitant, anchored upon a chair in the middle of the sidewalk and inhaling the fresh air of the street, fingered and rattled the precious coin in the capacious pocket beneath her apron--the coin that rings so sweetly in the ears of the petty tradesmen of Paris, that the retired shopkeeper is melancholy beyond words at first, because he no longer has the chinking and the tinkling under his hand. XII When the spring came, Germinie said to Jupillon almost every evening: "Suppose we go as far as the beginning of the fields?" Jupillon would put on his flannel shirt with red and black squares, and his black velvet cap; and they would start for what the people of the quarter call "the beginning of the fields." They would go up the Chaussee Clignancourt, and, with the flood of Parisians from the faubourg hurrying to drink a little fresh air, would walk on toward the great patch of sky that rose straight from the pavements, at the top of the ascent, between the two lines of houses, unobstructed except by an occasional omnibus. The air was growing cooler and the sun shone only upon the roofs of the houses and the chimneys. As from a great door opening into the country, there came from the end of the street and from the sky beyond, a breath of boundless space and liberty. At the Chateau-Rouge they found the first tree, the first foliage. Then, at Rue du Chateau, the horizon opened before them in dazzling beauty. The fields stretched away in the distance, glistening vaguely in the powdery, golden haze of seven o'clock. All nature trembled in the daylight dust that the day leaves in its wake, upon the verdure it blots from sight and the houses it suffuses with pink. Frequently they descended the footpath covered with the figures of the game of hop-scotch marked out in charcoal, by long walls with an occasional overhanging branch, by lines of detached houses with gardens between. At their left rose tree-tops filled with light, clustering foliage pierced by the beams of the setting sun, which cast lines of fire across the bars of the iron gateways. After the gardens came hedgerows, estates for sale, unfinished buildings erected upon the line of projected streets and stretching out their jagged walls into empty space, with heaps of broken bottles at their feet; large, low, plastered houses, with windows filled with bird-cages and cloths, and with the Y of the sink-pipes at every floor; and openings into enclosures that resembled barnyards, studded with little mounds on which goats were browsing. They would stop here and there and smell the flowers, inhale the perfume of a meagre lilac growing in a narrow lane. Germinie would pluck a leaf in passing and nibble at it.