"Why I will not let you go out into the streets?" said Barlasch one
February morning, stamping the snow from his boots. "Why I will not
let you go out into the streets?"
He turned and followed Desiree towards the kitchen, after having
carefully bolted the heavy oaken door which had been strengthened as
if to resist a siege. Desiree's face had that clear pallor which
marks an indoor life; but Barlasch, weather-beaten, scorched and
wrinkled, showed no sign of having endured a month's siege in an
overcrowded city.
"I will tell you why I will not let you go into the streets.
Because they are not fit for any woman to go into--because if you
walked from here to the Rathhaus you would see sights that would
come back to you in your sleep, and wake you from it, when you are
an old woman. Do you know what they do with their dead? They throw
them outside their doors--with nothing to cover their starved
nakedness--as Lisa put her ashes in the street every morning. And
the cart goes round, as the dustman's cart used to go in times of
peace, and, like the dustman's cart, it drops part of its load, and
the dust that blows round it is the infection of typhus. That is
why you cannot go into the streets."
He unbuttoned his fur coat and displayed a smart new uniform; for
Rapp had put his miserable army into new clothes, with which many of
the Dantzig warehouses had been filled by Napoleon's order at the
beginning of the war.
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