The Mysteries Of Paris Volume I Part 5

"Next day, instead of going to Montfaucon, I went on the side of the Champs Elysees, so frightened was I of being drowned by the Chouette. I would have run to the end of the world, rather than be again in the Chouette's hands. After walking and walking, I fairly lost myself; I had not begged a farthing, and the more I thought the more frightened did I become. At night I hid myself in a timber-yard, under some piles of wood. As I was very little, I was able to creep under an old door and hide myself amongst a heap of logs. I was so hungry that I tried to gnaw a piece of the bark, but I could not bite it,--it was too hard. At length I fell asleep. In the morning, hearing a noise, I hid myself still further back in the wood-pile. It was tolerably warm, and, if I had had something to eat, I could not have been better off for the winter."

"Like me in the lime-kiln."

"I did not dare to quit the timber-yard, for I fancied that the Chouette would seek for me everywhere, to pull out my teeth and drown me, and that she would be sure to catch me if I stirred from where I was."

"Stay, do not mention that old beast's name again,--it makes the blood come into my eyes! The fact is, that you have known misery,--bitter, bitter misery. Poor little mite! how sorry I am that I threatened to beat you just now, and frightened you. As I am a man, I did not mean to do it."

"Why, would you not have beaten me? I have no one to defend me."

"That's the very reason, because you are not like the others,--because you have no one to take your part,--that I would not have beaten you.

When I say no one, I do not mean our comrade Rodolph; but his coming was a chance, and he certainly did give me my full allowance when we met."

"Go on, my child," said Rodolph. "How did you get away from the timber-yard?"

"Next day, about noon, I heard a great dog barking under the wood-pile.

I listened, and the bark came nearer and nearer; then a deep voice exclaimed, 'My dog barks,--somebody is hid in the yard!' 'They are thieves,' said another voice; and the men then began to encourage the dog, and cry, 'Find 'em! find 'em, lad!' The dog ran to me, and, for fear of being bitten, I began to cry out with all my might and main.

'Hark!' said one of them; 'I hear the cry of a child.' They called back the dog; I came out from the pile of wood, and saw a gentleman and a man in a blouse. 'Ah, you little thief! what are you doing in my timber-yard?' said the gentleman, in a cross tone. I put my hands together and said, 'Don't hurt me, pray. I have had nothing to eat for two days, and I've run away from the Chouette, who pulled out my tooth, and said she would throw me over to the fishes. Not knowing where to sleep, I was pa.s.sing before your door, and I slept for the night amongst these logs, under this heap, not thinking I hurt anybody.'

"'I'm not to be gammoned by you, you little hussy! You came to steal my logs. Go and call the watch,' said the timber-merchant to his man."

"Ah, the old vagabond! The old reprobate! Call the watch! Why didn't he send for the artillery?" said the Chourineur. "Steal his logs, and you only eight years old! What an old a.s.s!"

"'Not true, sir,' his man replied. 'Steal your logs, master! How can she do that? She is not so big as the smallest piece!' 'You are right,'

replied the timber-merchant; 'but if she does not come for herself, she does for others. Thieves have a parcel of children, whom they send to pry about and hide themselves to open the doors of houses. She must be taken to the commissary, and mind she does not escape.'"

"Upon my life, this timber-merchant was more of a log than any log in his own yard," said the Chourineur.

"I was taken to the commissary," resumed Goualeuse. "I accused myself of being a wanderer, and they sent me to prison. I was sent before the Tribunal, and sentenced, as a rogue and vagabond, to remain until I was sixteen years of age in a house of correction. I thank the judges much for their kindness; for in prison I had food, I was not beaten, and it was a paradise after the c.o.c.k-loft of the Chouette. Then, in prison I learned to sew; but, sad to say, I was idle: I preferred singing to work, and particularly when I saw the sun shine. Ah, when the sun shone on the walls of the prison I could not help singing; and then, when I could sing, I seemed no longer to be a prisoner. It was after I began to sing so much that they called me Goualeuse, instead of Pegriotte. Well, when I was sixteen, I left the gaol. At the door, I found the ogress here, and two or three old women, who had come to see my fellow prisoners, and who had always told me that when I left the prison they would find work for me."

"Yes, yes, I see," said the Chourineur.

"'My pretty little maid,' said the ogress and her old companions, 'come and lodge with us; we will give you good clothes, and then you may amuse yourself.' I didn't like them, and refused, saying to myself, 'I know how to sew very well, and I have two hundred francs in hand. I have been eight years in prison, I should like to enjoy myself a bit,--that won't hurt anybody; work will come when the money is spent.' And so I began to spend my two hundred francs. Ah, that was my mistake," added Fleur-de-Marie, with a sigh. "I ought first to have got my work; but I hadn't a soul on earth to advise me. At sixteen, to be thrown on the city of Paris, as I was, one is so lonely; and what is done is done. I have done wrong, and I have suffered for it. I began then to spend my money: first, I bought flowers to put in my room,--I do love flowers!--then I bought a gown, a nice shawl, and I took a walk in the Bois de Boulogne, and I went to St. Germains, Vincennes, and other country places. Oh, how I love the country!"

"With a lover by your side, my girl?" asked the Chourineur.

"Oh, _mon Dieu!_ no! I like to be my own mistress. I had my little excursions with a friend who was in prison with me,--a good little girl as can be: they call her Rigolette, because she is always laughing."

"Rigolette! Rigolette! I don't know her," said the Chourineur, who appeared to be appealing to his memory.

"I didn't think you knew her. I am sure Rigolette was very well behaved in prison, and always so gay and so industrious, she took out with her when she left the prison at least four hundred francs that she had earned. And then she is so particular!--you should see her! When I say I had no one to advise me, I am wrong: I ought to have listened to her; for, after having had a week's amus.e.m.e.nt together, she said to me, 'Now we have had such a holiday, we ought to try for work, and not spend our money in waste.' I, who was so happy in the fields and the woods,--it was just at the end of spring, this year,--I answered, 'Oh, I must be idle a little longer, and then I will work hard.' Since that time I have not seen Rigolette, but I heard a few days since that she was living near the Temple,--that she was a famous needlewoman, and earned at least twenty-five sous a-day, and has a small workroom of her own; but now I could not for the world see her again,--I should die with shame if I met her."

"So, then, my poor girl," said Rodolph, "you spent your money in the country,--you like the country, do you?"

"Like it? I love it! Oh, what would I not give to live there? Rigolette, on the contrary, prefers Paris, and likes to walk on the Boulevards; but she is so nice and so kind, she went into the country only to please me."

"And you did not even leave yourself a few sous to live upon whilst you found work?" said the Chourineur.

"Yes, I had reserved about fifty francs; but it happened that I had for my washerwoman a woman called Lorraine, a poor thing, with none but the good G.o.d to protect her. She was then very near her confinement, and yet was obliged all day long to be with her hands and feet in her washing-tubs. She fell sick, and, not being able to work, applied for admittance to a lying-in hospital, but there was no room. She could not work, and her time was very near at hand, and she had not a son to pay for the bed in a garret, from which they drove her. Fortunately, she met one day, at the end of the Pont Notre-Dame, with Goubin's wife, who had been hiding for four days in a cellar of a house which was being pulled down behind the Hotel Dieu--"

"But why was Goubin's wife hiding?"

"To escape from her husband, who threatened to kill her; and she only went out at night to buy some bread, and it was then she met with the poor Lorraine, ill, and hardly able to drag herself along, for she was expecting to be brought to bed every hour. Well, it seems this Goubin's wife took her to the cellar where she was hiding,--it was just a shelter, and no more. There she shared her bread and straw with the poor Lorraine, who was confined in this cellar of a poor little infant; her only covering and bed was straw! Well, it seems that Goubin's wife could not bear it, and so, going out at all risks, even of being killed by her husband, who was looking for her everywhere, she left the cellar in open day, and came to me. She knew I had still a little money left, and that I could a.s.sist her if I would; so, when Helmina had told me all about poor Lorraine, who was obliged to lie with her new-born babe on straw, I told her to bring them both to my room at once, and I would take a chamber for her next to mine. This I did; and, oh, how happy she was, poor Lorraine, when she found herself in a bed, with her babe beside her in a little couch which I had bought for her! Helmina and I nursed her until she was able to get about again, and then, with the rest of my money, I enabled her to return to her washing-tubs."

"And when all your money was spent on Lorraine and her infant, what did you do, my child?" inquired Rodolph.

"I looked out for work; but it was too late. I can sew very well, I have good courage, and thought that I had only to ask for work and get it.

Ah! how I deceived myself! I went into a shop where they sell ready-made linen, and asked for employment, and as I would not tell a story, I said I had just left prison. They showed me the door, without making me any answer. I begged they would give me a trial, and they pushed me into the street as if I had been a thief. Then I remembered, too late, what Rigolette had told me. Little by little I sold my small stock of clothes and linen, and when all was gone they turned me out of my lodging. I had not tasted food for two days; I did not know where to sleep. At this moment I met the ogress and one of her old women who knew where I lodged, and was always coming about me since I left prison. They told me they would find me work, and I believed them. I went with them, so exhausted for want of food that my senses were gone. They gave me brandy to drink, and--and--here I am!" said the unhappy creature, hiding her face in her hands.

"Have you lived a long time with the ogress, my poor girl?" asked Rodolph, in accents of the deepest compa.s.sion.

"Six weeks, sir," replied Goualeuse, shuddering as she spoke.

"I see,--I see," said the Chourineur; "I know you now as well as if I were your father and mother, and you had never left my lap. Well, well, this is a confession indeed!"

"It makes you sad, my girl, to tell the story of your life," said Rodolph.

"Alas! sir," replied Fleur-de-Marie, sorrowfully, "since I was born this is the first time it ever happened to me to recall all these things at once, and my tale is not a merry one."

"Well," said the Chourineur, ironically, "you are sorry, perhaps, that you are not a kitchen-wench in a cook-shop, or a servant to some old brutes who think of no one but themselves."

"Ah!" said Fleur-de-Marie, with a deep sigh, "to be quite happy, we must be quite virtuous."

"Oh, what is your little head about now?" exclaimed the Chourineur, with a loud burst of laughter. "Why not count your rosary in honour of your father and mother, whom you never knew?"

"My father and mother abandoned me in the street like a puppy that is one too many in the house; perhaps they had not enough to feed themselves," said Goualeuse, with bitterness. "I want nothing of them,--I complain of nothing,--but there are lots happier than mine."

"Yours! Why, what would you have? You are as handsome as a Venus, and yet only sixteen and a half; you sing like a nightingale, behave yourself very prettily, are called Fleur-de-Marie, and yet you complain!

What will you say, I should like to know, when you will have a stove under your 'paddlers,' and a chinchilla boa, like the ogress?"

"Oh, I shall never be so old as she is."

"Perhaps you have a charm for never growing any older?"

"No; but I could not lead such a life. I have already a bad cough."

"Ah, I see you already in the 'cold-meat box.' Go along, you silly child, you!"

"Do you often have such thoughts as these, Goualeuse?" said Rodolph.

"Sometimes. You, perhaps, M. Rodolph, understand me. In the morning, when I go to buy my milk from the milkwoman at the corner of Rue de la Vieille-Draperie, with the sous which the ogress gives me, and see her go away in her little cart drawn by her donkey, I do envy her so, and I say to myself, 'She is going into the country, to the pure air, to her home and her family;' and then I return alone into the garret of the ogress, where you cannot see plainly even at noonday."

"Well, child, be good--laugh at your troubles--be good," said the Chourineur.

"Good! _mon Dieu!_ and how do you mean be good? The clothes I wear belong to the ogress, and I am in debt to her for my board and lodging.

I can't stir from her; she would have me taken up as a thief. I belong to her, and I must pay her."

When she had uttered these last words, the unhappy girl could not help shuddering, and a tear trembled in her long eyelashes.

"Well, but remain as you are, and do not compare yourself to a country milkwoman," said the Chourineur. "Are you taking leave of your senses?