Until eleven o'clock the girls from these brothels had permission to roam the streets in turn in the quarter itself and even to go and dance at the Waux-Hall and Frascati, two dance-halls in the Fossé-du-Bourg.
After that hour, a partial curfew, only serious habitues wandered there, upon whom, little by little, the dives finally closed their doors. The screeching of fiddles was hushed. Soon one could hear only the lamentation of the river at full-tide, the plashing of the water against the piles of the docks, the intermittent grumble of a boat being fired up in anticipation of its early morning departure.
It was the hour of stealthy parties, of concealed obscenity. Noctambulists, their collars turned up, their hats pushed down over their eyes, slid along the yellow houses and tapped masonic signals on the secret doors of byways.
All banquets and celebrations terminated in a pilgrimage to the Riet-Dijk. Strangers had themselves taken there at night after having visited, during the day, the printing house of Plantin-Moretus and the Rubens' in the Cathedral. Orators at banquets took their last toasts there.
The ups and downs of this peculiar quarter coincided with the fluctuations of commerce in the metropolis. The period of the Franco-Prussian war was the golden age, the apogee of the Riet-Dijk. Never had so many fortunes been suddenly made, nor had parvenus ever sprung up in so great a hurry to enjoy them.
Their contemporaries told over and over again, while waiting until legend should have immortalized them, of the lupercalia celebrated in these temples by crafty and sedate looking nabobs. On certain days of record the habitues would requisition all the staff, after the
