“In all these seven years, that idiot of a girl has never spoken a word about nephews and a sister!” said Max to himself, as he turned out of the Rue Marmouse into the Rue l’Avenier. “Seven hundred and fifty thousand francs in the hands of ten or twelve different notaries, at Bourges, Vierzon, and Châteauroux, cannot be drawn out or invested in State securities within a week without its being known in a land of ‘jaw.’ To begin with, we must pack off the relations; but once quit of them, we must make haste and secure that fortune. Well, I must think it over.”
Max was tired. He went into Rouget’s house with a latchkey, and crept noiselessly to bed, saying to himself, “Tomorrow my ideas will be clearer.”
It will not be useless here to explain whence the Sultana of the Place Saint-Jean had obtained the nickname of la Rabouilleuse, and how she had gained the command of the Rouget establishment.
As he had advanced in years, the old doctor, father of Jean-Jacques and of Madame Bridau, had become aware of his son’s utter stupidity. He then held him very tight, trying to force him into habits which would take the place of wisdom; but by this means, without knowing it, he was preparing him to be tame under the first tyrant that might succeed in getting the halter round his neck. One day, as he rode home from his rounds, the wily and vicious old man saw a lovely little girl on the skirt of the water-meadow by the avenue to Tivoli. On hearing the horse, the child rose up from the bottom of one of the channels, which, seen from the height of Issoudun, look like silver ribbons on a green dress. Starting up like a naiad, the girl displayed to the doctor one of the sweetest virgin heads that ever painter dreamed of. Old Rouget, who knew the whole neighborhood, did not know this miracle of beauty. The child, almost naked, wore a tattered and scanty petticoat full of holes, and made of cheap woolen stuff, striped brown and white. A sheet of paper, fastened down by an osier withy, served her for a hat. Under this paper, scrawled over with strokes and O’s, fully justifying its name of scribbling paper, was gathered up the most beautiful golden hair that any daughter of Eve could desire, fastened in a twist with a horse’s currycomb. Her pretty sunburnt bosom, scarcely covered by the rags of a handkerchief that had once been a bandana, showed its whiteness below the sunburn. The petticoat, pulled through between the legs and fastened by a coarse pin, looked a good deal like a swimmer’s bathing drawers. Her feet and legs, visible through the clear water, were characterized by a slenderness worthy of the sculptors of the Middle Ages. This fair body, from exposure to the sun, had a rosy hue which was not ungraceful; the neck and bosom were worthy to be covered by a silken shawl. Finally, the nymph had blue eyes, shaded by lashes whose expression would have brought a painter or a poet to his knees. The doctor, enough of an anatomist to know a lovely figure, perceived that all the arts would be losers if this exquisite person were destroyed by field labor.
“Where do you come from, little one? I never saw you before,” said the old doctor of sixty-two.
The scene took place in the month of September 1799.
“I belong to Vatan,” replied the girl.
On hearing a town accent, an ill-looking man, about two hundred yards away, standing in the upper waters of the stream, raised his head.
“Now, then, what are you at, Flore?” he called out. “Jabbering there instead of working; all the basketful will get off!”
“And what do you come here for from Vatan?” asked the doctor, not troubling himself about this interruption.
“I rabouille for my uncle Brazier there.”
Rabouiller is a local word of le Berry, which perfectly describes the process it is meant to represent—the action of stirring the waters of a brooklet by beating them with a sort of large racket made of the branch of a tree. The crayfish, frightened by the commotion, of which they fail to see the purpose, hastily escape up stream, and in their agitation rush into the nets, which the poacher has placed at a proper distance. Flore Brazier held her racket, or rabouilloir, with the unconscious grace of innocence.
“But has your uncle got leave to fish for crayfish?”
“Well, and aren’t we under the Republic one and indivisible?” shouted uncle Brazier from where he stood.
“We are under the Directory,” said the doctor; “and I know of no law which will allow a man from Vatan to come and fish within the limits of the Commune of Issoudun.” Then he said to Flore, “Is your mother living, child?”
“No, sir, and my father is in hospital at Bourges; he went mad after getting a sunstroke on his head in the fields—”
“How much do you earn?”
“Five sous a day all the season for crayfish—I goes to Braisne, ever so far, to beat the waters. Then in harvest-time, I gleans; and in winter, I spins.”
“You are about twelve, I suppose?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Would you like to come with me? You shall be well fed, nicely dressed, have pretty shoes—”
“No, no. My niece has got to stay wi’ me. I have her in charge before God and man,” said uncle Brazier, who had come down to his niece and the doctor. “I am her guardian, I am.”
The doctor preserved his gravity, suppressing a smile, which would certainly have been too much for anyone else at the sight of uncle Brazier. This “guardian” had on a peasant’s broad hat, ruined by the sun and rain,
