An hour later, having taken a cab, she was wandering about behind the Butte Montmartre, unable to find the Cité. At last, in one of the deserted streets running out of the Rue Marcadet, an old woman pointed it out to the cabman. At the entrance it was like some broken-up country road blocked with mud and refuse, and leading across a tract of waste land. It was only after an attentive glance that you distinguished the miserable shanties, compounded of earth, old boards, and zinc, and looking like heaps of rubbish around the inner courtyard. At the street corner, a one-storey house built of freestone, but repulsively decrepit and filthy, seemed to command the entrance, like a gaol. And here, indeed, lived La Méchain, like a vigilant proprietress, ever on the watch, exploiting in person her little population of starving tenants. As soon as Madame Caroline had stepped from the cab, she saw La Méchain appear on the threshold, with her enormous figure swaying in an ancient blue silk dress, frayed at the folds and cracked at the seams, and with cheeks so puffy and red that her tiny nose, almost lost to sight, seemed to be cooking between two live coals. At this sight Madame Caroline hesitated, filled with a sudden feeling of uneasiness, but all at once the woman's gentle voice, which had the shrilly charm of a shepherd's pipe, reassured her. 'Ah! madame, Monsieur Busch sends you; you came for little Victor. Come in, come in. Yes, this is really the Cité de Naples. The street is not classified; we have no numbers yet. Come in. We must talk it all over first. _Mon Dieu_, it is so annoying, it is so sad!' And then Madame Caroline had to accept a dilapidated chair, in a dining-room black with grease, where a red-hot stove kept up a stifling temperature and odour. La Méchain next had a deal to say about the visitor's luck in finding her there, for she had so much business to attend to in Paris that she seldom reached home before six o'clock. It became necessary to interrupt her. 'Excuse me, madame, I came about this poor child.' 'Precisely, madame, I am going to show him to you. You know that his mother was my cousin. Ah! I can say that I have done my duty. Here are the papers, here are the accounts.' Going to a cupboard, she thereupon took from it a package of papers, carefully arranged, and enclosed in a blue wrapper such as lawyers use. And she talked on endlessly about the unhappy Rosalie, who had undoubtedly ended by leading a fearful life, though originally she had been a good hard-working girl.