ingale, 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?
Only think, you may yet cut a figure in the capital, whilst the
milkwoman must boil the pot for her brats, milk her cows, gather grass
for her rabbits, and, perhaps, after all, get a black eye from her
husband when he comes home from the pot-house. Why, it is really
ridiculous to hear you talk of envying her."

The Goualeuse did not reply; her eye was fixed, her heart was full, and
the expression of her face was painfully distressed. Rodolph had
listened to the recital, made with so painful a frankness, with deep
interest. Misery, destitution, ignorance of the world, had weighed down
this wretched girl, cast at sixteen years of age on the wide world of
Paris!

Rodolph involuntarily thought of a beloved child whom he had lost,--a
girl, dead at six years of age, and who, had she survived, would have
been, like Fleur-de-Marie, sixte