He felt that the dressing rooms were empty, the corridors deserted; not a soul was there; not a sound broke the stillness, while through the square windows on the level of the stairs the pale November sunlight filtered and cast yellow patches of light, full of dancing dust, amid the dead, peaceful air which seemed to descend from the regions above.
He was glad of this calm and the silence, and he went slowly up, trying to regain breath as he went, for his heart was thumping, and he was afraid lest he might behave childishly and give way to sighs and tears.
Accordingly on the first-floor landing he leaned up against a wall--for he was sure of not being observed--and pressed his handkerchief to his mouth and gazed at the warped steps, the iron balustrade bright with the friction of many hands, the scraped paint on the walls--all the squalor, in fact, which that house of tolerance so crudely displayed at the pale afternoon hour when courtesans are asleep.

When he reached the second floor he had to step over a big yellow cat which was lying curled up on a step.

With half-closed eyes this cat was keeping solitary watch over the house, where the close and now frozen odors which the women nightly left behind them had rendered him somnolent.
In the right-hand corridor the door of the dressing room had, indeed, not been closed entirely.

Nana was waiting.

That little Mathilde, a drab of a young girl, kept her dressing room in a filthy state.