seven o’clock
in the morning
They had been walking about the town for three hours , but they could not resolve to go home empty-handed . Ah , this Plassans , with its Cours Sauvaire , its Rue de Rome , and its Rue de la Banne , dividing it into three quarters ; this Plassans ; with its windows always closed , this sun-baked town , dead in appearance , but which concealed under this sleeping surface a whole nocturnal life of the clubhouse and the gaming table . They walked through it three times more with slackened pace , on this clear , calm close of a glowing August day . In the yard of the coach office a few old stage-coaches , which still plied between the town and the mountain villages , were standing unharnessed ; and under the thick shade of the plane trees at the doors of the cafes , the customers , who were to be seen from seven o'clock in the morning , looked after them smiling . In the new town , too , the servants came and stood at the doors of the wealthy houses ; they met with less sympathy here than in the deserted streets of the Quartier St. Marc , whose antique houses maintained a friendly silence . They returned to the heart of the old quarter where they were most liked ; they went as far as St. Saturnin , the cathedral , whose apse was shaded by the garden of the chapter , a sweet and peaceful solitude , from which a beggar drove them by himself asking an alms from them . They were building rapidly in the neighborhood of the railway station ; a new quarter was growing up there , and they bent their steps in that direction .