milk her. Bless me! I came near being caught at it! My oldest sister was
out at service with the Mayor of Lenclos, and she sent home her
wages--twenty-four francs--it was always as much as that. The second
worked at dressmaking in bourgeois families; but they didn't pay the
prices then that they do to-day; she worked from six in the morning till
dark for eight sous. Out of that she wanted to put some by for a dress
for the fete on Saint-Remi's day.--Ah! that's the way it is with us:
there are many who live on two potatoes a day for six months so as to
have a new dress for that day. Bad luck fell on us on all sides. My
father died. We had to sell a small field, and a bit of a vineyard that
yielded a cask of wine every year. The notaries don't work for nothing.
When my brother was sick there was nothing to give him to drink but
_lees_ that we'd been putting water to for a year. And there wasn't any
change of linen for him; all the sheets in the wardrobe, which had a
golden cross on top of it in mother's time, had gone--and the cross too.
More than that, before he was sick this time, my brother goes off to the
fete at Clefmont. He hears someone say that my sister had gone wrong
with the mayor she worked for; he falls on the men who said it, but he
wasn't very strong. They were, though, and they threw him down, and when
he was down, they kicked him with their wooden shoes, in the pit of the
stomach. He was brought home to us for dead. The doctor put him on his
feet again, though, and told us he was cured. But he could just drag
himself along. I could see that he was going when he kissed me. When he
was dead, poor dear boy, Cadet Ballard had to use all his strength to
take me away from the body. The whole village, mayor and all, went to
his funeral. As my sister couldn't keep her place with the mayor on
account of the things he said to her, and had gone to Paris to find a
place, my other sister went after her. I was left all alone. One of my
mother's cousins then took me with her to Damblin; but I was all upset
there; I cried all night long, and whenever I could run away I always
went back to our house. Just to see the old vine at our door, from the
end of the street, did me good! it put strength into my legs. The good
people who had bought the house would keep me till someone came for me!
they were always sure to find me there. At last they wrote to my sister
in Paris that, if she didn't send for me to come and live with her,