For seven long months D'Antrechaus carried out a wager, which
would have been held impossible, the keeping, namely, and feeding in
their own houses, of a people numbering 26,000 souls. All that time
Toulon was one vast tomb. No one stirred save in the morning, to deal
out bread from door to door, and then to carry off the dead. Most of
the doctors perished, and the magistrates all but D'Antrechaus. The
gravediggers also perished, and their places were filled by condemned
deserters, who went to work with brutal and headlong violence. Bodies
were thrown into the tumbril, head downwards, from the fourth storey.
One mother, having just lost her little girl, shrunk from seeing her
poor wee body thus hurled below, and by dint of bribing, managed to
get it lowered the proper way. As they were bearing it off, the child
came to; it lived still. They took her up again, and she survived, to
become the grandmother of the learned M. Brun, who wrote an excellent
history of the port.

Poor little Cadiere was exactly the same age as this girl who died and
lived again, being twelve years old, an age for her sex so full of
danger. In the general closing of the churches, in the putting down of
all holidays, and chiefly of Christmas, wont to be so merry a season
at Toulon, the child's fancy saw the end of all things. It seems as
though she never quite shook off that fancy. Toulon never raised her
head again. She retained her desert-like air. Everything was in ruins,
everyone in mourning; widowers, orphans, desperate beings were
everywhere seen. In the midst, a mighty shadow, moved D'Antrechaus
himself; he had seen all about him perish, his sons, his brothers, and
his colleagues; and was now so gloriously ruined, that he was fain to
look to his neighbours for his daily meals. The poor quarrelled among
themselves for the honour of feeding him.

The young girl told her mother that she would never more wear any of
her smarter clothes, and she must, therefore, sell them. She would do
nothing but wait upon the sick, and she was always dragging her to the
hospital at the end of the street. A little neighbour-girl of
fourteen, Laugier by name, who had lost her father, was living with
her mother in great wretchedness. Catherine was continually going to
them with food and clothes, and anything she could get for them. She
begged her parents to defray the cost of apprenticing Laugier to a
dressmaker; and such was her sway over them that they could no