The stopping of the carriage interrupted Octave's narrative. "Here we are," he said, seizing a bell hanging on a jangling wire, and the green door in the crumbling wall opened, and I saw an undersized woman--I saw Alphonsine! And her portrait, a life-sized caricature drawn by Octave, faced me from the white-washed wall of the hen-coop. He had drawn her two cats purring about her legs, and had written under it, "Ils viennent après le mou." Her garden was a gravelled space; I think there was one tree in it. A tent had been stretched from wall to wall; and a seedy-looking waiter laid the tables (there were two), placing bottles of wine in front of each knife and fork, and bread in long sticks at regular intervals. He was constantly disturbed by the ringing of the bell, and had to run to the door to admit the company. Here and there I recognised faces that I had already seen in the studio; Clementine, who last year was studying the part of Elsa and this year was singing, "La femme de feu, la cui, la cui, la cuisinière," in a _café chantant_; and Margaret Byron, who had just retreated from Russia--a disastrous campaign hers was said to have been. The greater number were _hors concours_, for Alphonsine's was to the aged courtesan what Chelsea Hospital is to the aged soldier. It was a sort of human garden full of the sound and colour of October. I scrutinised the crowd. How could any one of these women interest the woman whose portrait I had seen in Barrès's studio? That one, for instance, whom I saw every morning in the Rue des Martyres, in a greasy _peignoir_, going marketing, a basket on her arm. Search as I would I could not find a friend for Marie among the women nor a lover among the men--neither of those two stout middle-aged men with large whiskers, who had probably once been stockbrokers, nor the withered journalist whom I heard speaking to Octave about a duel he had fought recently; nor the little sandy Scotchman whose French was not understood by the women and whose English was nearly unintelligible to me; nor the man who looked like a head-waiter--Alphonsine's lover; he had been a waiter, and he told you with the air of Napoleon describing Waterloo that he had "created" a certain fashionable café on the Boulevard. I could not attribute any one of these men to Marie; and Octave spoke of her with indifference; she had interested him to paint, and now he hoped she would get the Russian to buy her picture. "But she's not here," I said. "She'll be here presently," Octave answered, and he went on talking to Clementine, a fair pretty woman whom one saw every night at the _Rat Mort_. It was when the soup-plates were being taken away that I saw a young woman dressed in black coming across the garden. It was she, Marie Pellegrin.