four o'clock in the afternoon
And now , when all the heart that I can save Is used to furnish forth its epitaph . Gay as a sexton digging his own grave I burst into a wild and frantic laugh ; A laugh engendered by a mocking vein ; The pen I grasped was trembling as I wrote ; And even while I laughed , a scalding rain Of tears turned all the writing to a blot . It was the 24th of December , and that evening the Latin Quarter bore a special aspect . Since four o'clock in the afternoon the pawnbroking establishments and the shops of the second hand clothes dealers and booksellers had been encumbered by a noisy crowd , who , later in the evening , took the ham and beef shops , cook shops , and grocers by assault . The shopmen , even if they had had a hundred arms , like Briareus , would not have sufficed to serve the customers who struggled with one another for provisions . At the baker 's they formed a string as in times of dearth . The wine shop keepers got rid of the produce of three vintages , and a clever statistician would have found it difficult to reckon up the number of knuckles of ham and of sausages which were sold at the famous shop of Borel , in the Rue Dauphine .