It was screened half-way up by a sheet of iron with a toothed edge, and its rusty spikes did not rise more than ten feet above the ground.

In the centre, between two pillars of masonry surmounted by cast-iron vases, the railing formed a gate opening in the middle, filled in across its lower part, and furnished, on the inside, with worm-eaten slatted shutters.
They alighted from the cab.

The trees of the boulevard, in four straight lines, lifted their frail skeletons in the fog.

They heard, through the wide silence, the diminishing rattle of their cab, on its way back to the barrier, and the trotting of a horse coming from Paris.
"How dismal the country is!" she said, with a shiver.
"But, my darling, the Boulevard de Villiers is not the country." He could not open the gate, and the lock creaked.

Irritated by the sound, she said: "Open it, do: the noise is getting on my nerves." She noticed that the cab which had come from Paris had stopped near their house, at about the tenth tree from where she stood; she looked at the thin, steaming horse and the shabby driver, and asked: "What is that carriage ?" "It's a cab, my pet." "Why does it stop here ?" "It has not stopped here?
It's stopping in front of the next house." "There is no next house; there's only a vacant lot." "Well, then, it has stopped in front of a vacant lot.