sumed la Gaultiere, "that nobody will apply for it."

"Ah, good heavens!" exclaimed Agnes; "those poor nurses yonder in the
foundling asylum, which forms the lower end of the lane as you go to the
river, just beside Monseigneur the bishop! what if this little monster
were to be carried to them to suckle? I'd rather give suck to a
vampire."

"How innocent that poor la Herme is!" resumed Jehanne; "don't you see,
sister, that this little monster is at least four years old, and that he
would have less appetite for your breast than for a turnspit."

The "little monster" we should find it difficult ourselves to describe
him otherwise, was, in fact, not a new-born child. It was a very angular
and very lively little mass, imprisoned in its linen sack, stamped with
the cipher of Messire Guillaume Chartier, then bishop of Paris, with a
head projecting. That head was deformed enough; one beheld only a forest
of red hair, one eye, a mouth, and teeth. The eye wept, the mouth
cried, and the teeth seemed to ask only to be allowed to bite. The whole
struggled in the sack, to the great consternation of the crowd, which
increased and was renewed incessantly around it.

Dame Aloise de Gondelaurier, a rich and noble woman, who held by the
hand a pretty girl about five or six years of age, and dragged a long
veil about, suspended to the golden horn of her headdress, halted as she
passed the wooden bed, and gazed for a moment at the wretched creature,
while her charming little daughter, Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier,
spelled out with her tiny, pretty finger, the permanent inscription
attached to the wooden bed: "Foundlings."

"Really," said the dame, turning away in disgust, "I thought that they
only exposed children here."

She turned her back, throwing into the basin a silver florin, which rang
among the liards, and made the poor goodwives of the chapel of Etienne
Haudry open their eyes.

A moment later, the grave and learned Robert Mistricolle, the king's
protonotary, passed, with an enormous missal under one arm and his wife
on the other (Damoiselle Guillemette la Mairesse), having thus by his
side his two regulators,--spiritual and temporal.

"Foundling!" he said, after examining the object; "found, apparently, on
the banks of the river Phlegethon."

"One can only see one eye," observed Damoiselle Guillemette; "there is a
wart on the other."

"It's not a wart," returned Master Robert Mistricolle, "it is an egg
which contains