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