Part 19

--Patience! Mahiette resumed; you shall see a child, and from a child no less.--In '66, this very month, on Saint Paule's day, it will be sixteen years since Paquette gave birth to a little girl. The poor woman! she had great joy. She had long desired a child. Her mother, a good soul who had never known aught but to close her eyes, her mother was dead. Paquette had nothing left in the world to love, nothing that loved her. For five years she had been on the brink, she was a poor creature, this Chantefleurie. She was alone, alone in that life, pointed at with the finger, cried after in the streets, beaten by the sergeants, mocked by the ragged boys. And then the twenty years had come; and twenty years is old age for women who love. The madness began to bring her no more than the doreloterie had formerly; for every wrinkle that came, an écu went. Winter grew hard for her again, wood became once more scarce in her hearth and bread in her bin. She could no longer work, because in growing wanton she had grown idle, and she suffered far more, because in growing idle she had grown wanton. Or at least that is how Monsieur the curate of Saint-Remy explains why such women are colder and hungrier than other poor souls when they are old.

--Yes, observed Gervaise, but the Egyptians?

--Wait a moment then, Gervaise! said Oudarde, whose attention was less impatient. What would there be at the end if all were at the beginning? Continue, Mahiette, I pray you. This poor Chantefleurie!

Mahiette went on.

--She was then very sad, very wretched, and hollowed her cheeks with weeping. But in her shame, in her madness and in her desertion, it seemed to her that she would be less ashamed, less mad and less forsaken, if there were something in the world or someone whom she might love and who might love her. It must be a child, because only a child could be innocent enough for that.--She had learned this after trying to love a thief, the only man who could have wished for her; but after a little while she had perceived that the thief despised her.--To women of love there must be a lover or a child to fill their hearts. Otherwise they are most unhappy.--Being unable to have a lover, she turned wholly to the desire of a child, and as she had not ceased to be pious, she made it her eternal prayer to the good God. The good God took pity on her then, and gave her a little girl. Her joy, I shall not tell you of it. It was a frenzy of tears, caresses and kisses. She nursed her child herself, made swaddling-clothes of her coverlet, the only one she had upon her bed, and felt neither cold nor hunger any more. She grew fair again. An old maid makes a young mother. Gallantry returned, they came back to see Chantefleurie, she found customers for her wares again, and of all those horrors she made layettes, caps and bibs, laced bodices and little satin bonnets, without even thinking to buy herself another coverlet.--Master Eustache, I have already told you not to eat the cake.

--It is certain that little Agnès--that was the child's name, her baptismal name, for as to a family name, Chantefleurie had long had none,--it is certain that this little one was more bedecked with ribbons and embroidery than a dauphine of the Dauphiné! She had among other things a pair of little shoes! than which King Louis XI certainly never had the like! Her mother had sewn and embroidered them herself, putting into them all the niceties of a dorelotière and all the trimmings of a good Virgin's robe. They were indeed the two prettiest little pink shoes that could be seen. They were scarce longer than my thumb, and one had to see the child's little feet come out of them to believe they could have gone in. True, those little feet were so small, so pretty, so pink! pinker than the satin of the shoes!

--When you have children, Oudarde, you will know that nothing is prettier than those little feet and those little hands.

--I ask nothing better, said Oudarde, sighing, but I wait until it shall please Master Andry Musnier.

--Moreover, resumed Mahiette, Paquette's child had not only pretty feet. I saw her when she was but four months old. She was a love! Her eyes were larger than her mouth. And the most charming fine black hair, already curling. She would have made a fine brunette at sixteen! Her mother grew madder over her every day. She caressed her, kissed her, tickled her, washed her, dressed her fine, devoured her! She lost her head over her, she thanked God for her. Her pretty pink feet above all were a never-ending wonder, a delirium of joy; she ever had her lips glued to them, and could not recover from their smallness. She put them into the little shoes, drew them out, admired them, marvelled at them, looked at the daylight through them, pitied them in trying them to the walk upon her bed, and would willingly have spent her life on her knees, shoeing and unshoeing those feet like those of a child Jesus.

--The tale is fair and good, said Gervaise in an undertone, but where is the Egypt in all this?

--Here, replied Mahiette. There came one day to Reims certain very singular horsemen. They were beggars and truands travelling through the country, led by their duke and their counts. They were swarthy, had hair all curled, and silver rings in their ears. The women were uglier even than the men. They had faces blacker still and ever uncovered, a mangy cur upon the body, an old cloth woven of cords tied on the shoulder, and their hair in a horse's tail. The children that tumbled among their legs would have frightened monkeys. A band of excommunicates. All this came in a straight line from lower Egypt to Reims by way of Poland. The pope had shriven them, so it was said, and given them for penance to go seven years running through the world, without sleeping in beds. Hence they called themselves Penanciers and stank. It appears they had been Saracens formerly, which makes that they believed in Jupiter, and claimed ten livres tournois of all archbishops, bishops and abbots with crozier and mitre. It was a bull of the pope that earned them that. They came to Reims to tell fortunes in the name of the king of Algiers and the emperor of Germany. You may well think that it needed no more to have them forbidden entry to the city. Then the whole band camped right willingly near the Braine gate, on that hill where there is a mill, beside the holes of the old chalk-pits. And it was a race in Reims who should go see them. They looked in your hand and told you marvellous prophecies. They were capable of predicting to Judas that he should be pope. There ran meanwhile evil rumours of stolen children and cut purses and human flesh eaten. Wise folk said to fools: Go not there, and went themselves on the sly. It was thus a frenzy. The fact is they said things to astonish a cardinal. The mothers made great triumph of their children since the Egyptian women had read in their hands all sorts of miracles written in pagan and in Turkish. One had an emperor, another a pope, another a captain. Poor Chantefleurie was seized with curiosity. She would know what she had, and whether her pretty little Agnès should not one day be empress of Armenia or something else. She carried her therefore to the Egyptians; and the Egyptian women admired the child, caressed her, kissed her with their black mouths, and marvelled at her little hand. Alas! to the great joy of the mother. They made especial feast over the pretty feet and the pretty shoes. The child was not yet a year old. She already babbled, laughed at her mother like a little fool, was fat and round all over, and had a thousand charming little gestures of the angels of paradise. She was much frightened at the Egyptian women, and wept. But the mother kissed her the harder and went away ravished with the good fortune the seeresses had foretold of her Agnès. She was to be a beauty, a virtue, a queen. She returned therefore to her garret in the Rue Folle-Peine, proud to bring back a queen. The next day, she took advantage of a moment when the child slept upon her bed, for she ever laid her with her, left the door softly ajar, and ran to tell a neighbour in the Rue de la Séchesserie that there would come a day when her daughter Agnès should be served at table by the king of England and the archduke of Ethiopia, and a hundred other wonders. On her return, hearing no cries as she mounted her stair, she said to herself: Good! the child still sleeps. She found her door more open than she had left it, she entered nevertheless, the poor mother, and ran to the bed...--The child was no longer there, the place was empty. There was nothing left of the child, save one of her pretty little shoes. She sprang from the room, threw herself to the foot of the stair, and fell to beating the walls with her head, crying: My child! who has my child? who has taken my child? The street was deserted, the house isolated; no one could tell her aught. She went through the town, she sniffed out all the streets, ran hither and thither the whole day long, mad, distraught, terrible, scenting at doors and windows like a wild beast that has lost her young. She was panting, dishevelled, frightful to see, and she had in her eyes a fire that dried her tears. She stopped the passers-by and cried: My daughter! my daughter! my pretty little daughter! He who restores my daughter to me, I will be his servant, the servant of his dog, and he may eat my heart, if he will. She met Monsieur the curate of Saint-Remy, and said to him: Monsieur the curate, I will plough the earth with my nails, but restore me my child! It was heart-rending, Oudarde; and I saw a very hard man, Master Ponce Lacabre, the procurator, who wept. Ah! the poor mother! In the evening she came home. During her absence, a neighbour had seen two Egyptian women go up thither by stealth with a bundle in their arms, then come down again after shutting the door, and flee in haste. Since their departure, there had been heard at Paquette's a kind of child's cries. The mother laughed aloud, mounted the stair as if with wings, burst in her door as with a cannon-shot, and entered...--A frightful thing, Oudarde! Instead of her dainty little Agnès, so ruddy and fresh, who was a gift of the good God, a sort of little monster, hideous, limping, one-eyed, deformed, dragged itself squalling on the floor. She hid her eyes with horror. Oh! said she, have the witches then metamorphosed my daughter into this dreadful animal? They made haste to carry off the little club-foot. He would have driven her mad. It was a monstrous child of some Egyptian woman given to the devil. He seemed about four years old, and spoke a tongue that was no human tongue; they were words that are not possible. Chantefleurie had flung herself upon the little shoe, all that remained to her of all she had loved. She remained so long motionless, mute, breathless, that one thought her dead there. All at once she trembled in all her body, covered her relic with furious kisses, and broke forth in sobs as if her heart had just burst. I assure you we were all weeping too. She said: Oh! my little daughter! my pretty little daughter! where art thou? And that wrung your bowels. I weep still to think of it. Our children, you see, are the marrow of our bones.--My poor Eustache! thou art so fair, thou! If you knew how good he is! Yesterday he said to me: I want to be a man-at-arms, I. O my Eustache! if I lost thee! Chantefleurie rose suddenly and fell to running through Reims crying: To the Egyptian camp! to the Egyptian camp! Sergeants to burn the witches! The Egyptians were gone. It was pitch dark. They could not be pursued. The next day, two leagues from Reims, in a heath between Gueux and Tilloy, there were found the remains of a great fire, some ribbons that had belonged to Paquette's child, drops of blood, and goat-droppings. The night just past was precisely that of a Saturday. No doubt was left that the Egyptians had held the sabbath in that heath, and had devoured the child in company with Beelzebub, as is the custom among the Mahometans. When Chantefleurie learned these horrible things, she wept not, she moved her lips as if to speak, but could not. The next day her hair was grey. The day after, she had disappeared.

--There, indeed, is a frightful story, said Oudarde, and one to make a Burgundian weep!

--I wonder no more, added Gervaise, that the fear of the Egyptians dogs you so hard!

--And you did the better for it, resumed Oudarde, to flee just now with your Eustache, since these too are Egyptians from Poland.

--Not so, said Gervaise. They say they come from Spain and Catalonia.

--Catalonia? that may be, answered Oudarde. Poland, Catalonia, Valogne, I ever confound those three provinces. What is sure is that they are Egyptians.

--And who certainly, added Gervaise, have teeth long enough to eat little children. And I should not be surprised if the Smeralda ate a bit of one too, for all her little mouth. Her white goat has tricks too roguish for there not to be some libertinage underneath.

Mahiette walked in silence. She was absorbed in that reverie which is in some sort the prolongation of a painful tale, and which stays not till it has propagated the shock, from vibration to vibration, even to the last fibres of the heart. Meanwhile Gervaise spoke to her: And no one could learn what became of Chantefleurie? Mahiette answered not. Gervaise repeated her question, shaking her by the arm and calling her by name. Mahiette seemed to awake from her thoughts.

--What became of Chantefleurie? said she, mechanically repeating the words whose impression was still fresh in her ear; then, making an effort to bring back her attention to the sense of those words: Ah! she resumed briskly, it was never known.

She added after a pause:

--Some said they saw her leave Reims at dusk by the Fléchembault gate; others, at daybreak, by the old Basée gate. A poor man found her gold cross hanging on the stone cross in the field where the fair is held. It was that jewel which ruined her, in '61. It was a gift of the handsome vicomte de Cormontreuil, her first lover. Paquette had never been willing to part with it, poor as she had been. She clung to it as to life. So, when we saw that cross abandoned, we all thought her dead. Yet there are folk of the Cabaret-les-Vantes who said they saw her pass on the road to Paris, walking barefoot on the stones. But then she must have gone out by the Vesle gate, and all that agrees not; or, to speak more truly, I well believe she did indeed go out by the Vesle gate, but gone out of this world.

--I understand you not, said Gervaise.

--The Vesle, answered Mahiette with a melancholy smile, is the river.

--Poor Chantefleurie! said Oudarde, shuddering, drowned!

--Drowned! resumed Mahiette, and who would have said to good father Guybertaut when he passed under the Tinqueux bridge with the current, singing in his boat, that one day his dear little Paquette should pass under that bridge too, but without song and without boat?

--And the little shoe? asked Gervaise.

--Vanished with the mother, answered Mahiette.

--Poor little shoe! said Oudarde.

Oudarde, a stout and feeling woman, would have been well content to sigh in company with Mahiette. But Gervaise, more curious, was not at the end of her questions.

--And the monster? said she suddenly to Mahiette.

--What monster? asked the other.

--The little Egyptian monster left by the witches at Chantefleurie's in exchange for her daughter! What became of him? I hope well you drowned him too.

--Not so, answered Mahiette.

--How then? burnt, then? To be sure, that is more just. A wizard child!

--Neither the one nor the other, Gervaise. Monsieur the archbishop took an interest in the Egyptian child, exorcised him, blessed him, carefully drew the devil out of his body, and sent him to Paris to be exposed on the wooden bed at Notre-Dame, as a foundling.

--These bishops! said Gervaise, grumbling, because they are learned, they do nothing like others. Pray tell me, Oudarde, putting the devil to foundlings! for it was surely the devil that little monster was.--Well, Mahiette, what did they do with him at Paris? I reckon no charitable soul would have him.

--I know not, answered the woman of Reims. It was just at that time my husband bought the tabellionage of Beru, two leagues from the city, and we busied ourselves no more with that story; besides that, before Beru there are the two hills of Cernay, which make you lose sight of the spires of Reims cathedral.

While thus talking, the three worthy bourgeoises had arrived at the Place de Grève. In their preoccupation, they had passed without stopping before the public breviary of the Tour-Roland, and were mechanically making toward the pillory around which the crowd grew every moment. It is probable that the spectacle there attracting all eyes just then would have made them wholly forget the Trou aux Rats and the visit they had proposed to pay it, had not the fat Eustache of six years, whom Mahiette dragged by the hand, abruptly recalled the object to them: Mother, said he, as if some instinct warned him the Trou aux Rats was behind him, may I eat the cake now?

Had Eustache been more cunning, that is to say less greedy, he would have waited still, and it is only on the return, in the University, at home, at Master Andry Musnier's, in the Rue Madame-la-Valence, when there should have been the two arms of the Seine and the five bridges of the Cité between the Trou aux Rats and the cake, that he would have ventured this timid question: Mother, now may I eat the cake?

This same question, imprudent at the moment Eustache put it, reawoke Mahiette's attention.

--To the point, she cried, we forget the recluse! Show me your Trou aux Rats, that I may carry her the cake.

--Straightway, said Oudarde. It is a charity.

This was not Eustache's reckoning.

--Here, my cake! said he, beating his two ears alternately against his two shoulders, which in such case is the supreme sign of discontent.

The three women turned back, and, arriving near the Tour-Roland house, Oudarde said to the other two: You must not all three look into the hole at once, for fear of frightening the sachette. Do you two pretend to read dominus in the breviary, while I put my nose to the window. The sachette knows me a little. I will warn you when you may come.

She went alone to the window. The moment her sight pierced it, a deep pity painted itself on all her features, and her gay and frank countenance changed as abruptly in expression and colour as if she had passed from a sunbeam to a moonbeam. Her eye grew moist, her mouth contracted as when one is about to weep. A moment after, she put a finger to her lips and signed Mahiette to come see.

Mahiette came, moved, in silence and on tiptoe, as when one approaches a dying man's bed.

It was indeed a sad spectacle that offered itself to the two women's eyes, while they looked without moving or breathing at the grated window of the Trou aux Rats.

The cell was narrow, broader than deep, vaulted in ogive, and seen within resembled enough the alveole of a great bishop's mitre. Upon the bare flagstone that formed its floor, in a corner, a woman was seated or rather crouching. Her chin rested on her knees, which her crossed arms pressed tightly to her breast. Thus gathered upon herself, clad in a brown sack that wrapped her wholly in broad folds, her long grey hairs thrown forward falling over her face along her legs to her feet, she presented at first sight only a strange shape, cut out upon the dark ground of the cell, a kind of blackish triangle, which the day-ray coming from the window harshly cleft in two shades, one dark, the other lighted. It was one of those spectres half of shadow and half of light, such as are seen in dreams and in the strange work of Goya, pale, motionless, sinister, crouching upon a tomb or leaning to the grate of a dungeon. It was neither woman, nor man, nor living being, nor defined form; it was a figure; a sort of vision whereon the real and the fantastic crossed each other, as shadow and day. Scarce beneath her hairs spread to the earth could one distinguish a wasted and severe profile; scarce did her robe let pass the tip of a bare foot that clutched upon the rigid and frozen pavement. The little human shape one glimpsed beneath that mourning envelope made one shudder.

This figure, which one might have thought sealed in the flagstone, seemed to have neither movement, nor thought, nor breath. Beneath that thin cloth in January, lying bare upon a granite pavement, without fire, in the shadow of a dungeon whose oblique air-hole let in from without only the north wind and never the sun, she seemed not to suffer, not even to feel. One would have said she had made herself stone with the dungeon, ice with the season. Her hands were joined, her eyes fixed. At first sight one took her for a spectre, at second for a statue.

Yet at intervals her blue lips parted to a breath, and trembled, but as dead and as mechanical as leaves that part before the wind.

Yet from her dreary eyes escaped a look, a look ineffable, a look deep, lugubrious, imperturbable, incessantly fixed upon an angle of the cell that could not be seen from without; a look that seemed to attach all the dark thoughts of that distressed soul to I know not what mysterious object.

Such was the creature who took from her dwelling the name of recluse, and from her garment the name of sachette.

The three women, for Gervaise had joined Mahiette and Oudarde, looked through the window. Their heads intercepted the faint daylight of the dungeon, without the wretched one whom they thus deprived of it seeming to heed them. Do not disturb her, said Oudarde in a low voice, she is in her ecstasy, she prays.

Meanwhile Mahiette considered with ever-growing anxiety that wasted, faded, dishevelled head, and her eyes filled with tears. This would be very strange, murmured she.

She passed her head through the bars of the air-hole, and managed to bring her gaze as far as the angle where the wretched woman's look was invariable fixed.

When she drew her head from the window, her face was flooded with tears.

--What do you call that woman? she asked Oudarde.

Oudarde answered:

“Stories of the world, in your language.”