By degrees the crowd dispersed, and Gervaise was almost alone. Everyone was at dinner. She thought how delicious it would be to lie down and never rise again--to feel that all toil was over. And this was the end of her life! Gervaise, amid the pangs of hunger, thought of some of the fete days she had known and remembered that she had not always been miserable. Once she was pretty, fair and fresh. She had been a kind and admired mistress in her shop. Gentlemen came to it only to see her, and she vaguely wondered where all this youth and this beauty had fled. Again she looked up; she had reached the abattoirs, which were now being torn down; the fronts were taken away, showing the dark holes within, the very stones of which reeked with blood. Farther on was the hospital with its high, gray walls, with two wings opening out like a huge fan. A door in the wall was the terror of the whole _Quartier_--the Door of the Dead, it was called--through which all the bodies were carried. She hurried past this solid oak door and went down to the railroad bridge, under which a train had just passed, leaving in its rear a floating cloud of smoke. She wished she were on that train which would take her into the country, and she pictured to herself open spaces and the fresh air and expanse of blue sky; perhaps she could live a new life there. As she thought this her weary eyes began to puzzle out in the dim twilight the words on a printed handbill pasted on one of the pillars of the arch. She read one--an advertisement offering fifty francs for a lost dog. Someone must have loved the creature very much. Gervaise turned back again. The street lamps were being lit and defined long lines of streets and avenues. The restaurants were all crowded, and people were eating and drinking. Before the Assommoir stood a crowd waiting their turn and room within, and as a respectable tradesman passed he said with a shake of the head that many a man would be drunk that night in Paris. And over this scene hung the dark sky, low and clouded. Gervaise wished she had a few sous: she would, in that case, have gone into this place and drunk until she ceased to feel hungry, and through the window she watched the still with an angry consciousness that all her misery and all her pain came from that. If she had never touched a drop of liquor all might have been so different. She started from her reverie; this was the hour of which she must take advantage. Men had dined and were comparatively amiable. She looked around her and toward the trees where--under the leafless branches--she saw more than one female figure. Gervaise watched them, determined to do what they did. Her heart was in her throat; it seemed to her that she was dreaming a bad dream. She stood for some fifteen minutes; none of the men who passed looked at her. Finally she moved a little and spoke to one who, with his hands in his pockets, was whistling as he walked.