Madame Desforges then slowly ascended the staircase, preceded by Denise; but she had to stop every two or three steps to avoid being carried away by the descending crowd. In the living vibration of the whole building, the iron supports seemed to stagger beneath the weight, as if continually trembling from the breath of the crowd On each stair was a dummy, strongly fixed, displaying some garment: a costume, cloak, or dressing-gown; and it was like a double row of soldiers for some triumphal march-past, with the little wooden arm like the handle of a poniard, stuck into the red swan-skin, which gave a bloody appearance to the stump of a neck crowning the whole. Madame Desforges was at last reaching the first storey, when a still greater surging of the crowd forced her to stop once more. She had now, beneath her, the departments on the ground-floor, with the press of customers she had just passed through. It was a new spectacle, a sea of heads fore-shortened, concealing the bodices, swarming with a busy agitation. The white price tickets now appeared but so many thin lines, the promontory of flannels cut through the gallery like a narrow wall; whilst the carpets and the embroidered silks which decked the balustrades hung at her feet like processional banners suspended from the gallery of a church. In the distance, she could perceive the angles of the lateral galleries, as from the top of a steeple one perceives the corners of the neighbouring streets, with the black spots of the passers-by moving about. But what surprised her above all, in the fatigue of her eyes blinded by the brilliant pell mell of colours, was, when she lowered her lids, to feel the crowd more than its dull noise like the rising tide, and the human warmth that it exhaled. A fine dust rose from the floor, laden with the odour of woman, the odour of her linen and her bust, of her skirts and her hair, an invading, penetrating odour, which seemed to be the incense of this temple raised for the worship of her body. Meanwhile Mouret, still standing up before the reading-room with De Vallagnosc, was inhaling this odour, intoxicating himself with it, and repeating: “They are quite at home. I know some who spend the whole day here, eating cakes and writing their letters. There's only one thing more to do, and that is, to find them beds.”