eing recognized, of compromising himself by one of those outbursts
to which his impetuous nature would have given vent, no matter where he
might be. Then, too, he recoiled from the fatigue and severity of the
task. The little boy was still too small; he would have been crushed; so
the duty of obtaining bread for three mouths each day fell to the
daughter. She obtained it. With her little thin body, fairly lost in her
father's knitted jacket, a cotton cap pulled down over her eyes, her
limbs all huddled together to retain a little warmth, she would wait,
shivering, her eyes aching with cold, amid the pushing and buffeting,
until the baker's wife on Rue des Francs-Bourgeois placed in her hands a
loaf which her little fingers, stiff with cold, could hardly hold. At
last, this poor little creature, who returned day after day, with her
pinched face and her emaciated, trembling body, moved the baker's wife
to pity. With the kindness of heart of a woman of the people, she would
send the coveted loaf to the little one by her boy as soon as she
appeared in the long line. But one day, just as she put out her hand to
take it, a woman, whose jealousy was aroused by this mark of favor and
preference, dealt the child a kick with her wooden shoe which kept her
in bed almost a month. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil bore the marks of the
blow all her life.

During that month, the whole family would have died of starvation, had
it not been for a supply of rice, which one of their acquaintances, the
Comtesse d'Auteuil, had had the forethought to lay aside, and which she
consented to share with the father and the two children.

Thus, Monsieur de Varandeuil escaped the Revolutionary Tribunal by
burying himself in obscurity. He escaped it also by reason of the fact
that the accounts of his administration of his office were still
unsettled, as he had had the good fortune to procure the postponement of
the settlement from month to month. Then, too, he kept suspicion at bay
by his personal animosity toward some great personages at court, and by
the hatred of the queen which many retainers of the king's brothers had
conceived. Whenever he had occasion to speak of that wretched woman, he
used violent, bitter, insulting words, uttered in such a passionate,
sincere tone that they almost made him appear as an enemy of the royal
family; so that those to whom he was simply Citizen Roulot looked upon
him as a good patriot, and those who knew his former name