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igned Watteau. In that business he threw away what he had made, and ran in debt to the amount of several thousand francs. His wife, in order to straighten matters out a little and to try and get out of debt, asked for and obtained a place as box-opener at the _Theatre-Historique_. She hired her sister the dressmaker to watch the door in the evening, went to bed at one o'clock and was astir again at five. After a few months she caught cold in the corridors of the theatre, and an attack of pleurisy laid her low and carried her off in six weeks. The poor woman left a little girl three years old, who was taken down with the measles; the disease assumed its most malignant form in the foul stench of the loft, where the child had breathed for more than a month air poisoned by the breath of her dying mother. The father had gone into the country to try and borrow money. He married again there. Nothing more was heard of him. When returning from her sister's burial Germinie ran to the house of an old woman who made a living in those curious industries which prevent poverty from absolutely starving to death in Paris. This old woman carried on several trades. Sometimes she cut bristles into equal lengths for brushes, sometimes she sorted out bits of gingerbread. When those industries failed, she did cooking and washed the faces of pedlars' children. In Lent she rose at four o'clock in the morning, went and took possession of a chair at Notre-Dame, and sold it for ten or twelve sous when the crowd arrived. In order to procure fuel to warm herself, in the den where she lived on Rue Saint-Victor, she would go, at nightfall, to the Luxembourg and peel the bark off the trees. Germinie, who knew her from having given her the crusts from the kitchen every week, hired a servant's room on the sixth floor of the house, and took up her abode there with the little one. She did it on the impulse of the moment, without reflection. She did not remember her sister's harsh treatment of her when she was _enceinte_, so that she had no need to forgive it. Thenceforth Germinie had but one thought, her niece. She determined to rescue her from death and restore her to life by dint of careful nursing. She would rush away from Mademoiselle at every moment, run up the stairs to the sixth floor four at a time, kiss the child, give her her draught, arrange her comfortably in bed, look at her, and rush down again, all out of breath and red with pleasure. Care
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