I saw at a glance that she was a creature of the streets, one of those unfortunate beings with no home but the ash-heaps, no food but that she managed to rescue from the garbage-piles. She might have been ten years old, or twenty, it was impossible to tell—or, rather, it would be more correct to say that her body had the arrested development of a sickly child of ten, her face the preternatural shrewdness and knowledge of a street-woman twice that age. The rags in which she was clothed were horribly dirty, and as I set her again on her feet I shuddered to see that her legs were hideously bowed.
“There, my child,” I said, as I put her down, “you are quite safe now. In future be more careful where you are going. Another time you may not escape so fortunately.”
She looked at me with large eyes, in which there was a trace of tears.
“Yes, Monsieur,” she said. “You are very kind.”
“There, run along,” I answered, touched with pity as I looked at her pinched face, which under other circumstances might have been attractive—even pretty.
“Yes, Monsieur,” she said again. Still she did not move, but stood looking wistfully up into my face.
“What is it, my dear?” I asked, stooping down beside her.
She hesitated a moment, looked down at the pavement, and then slowly raised her eyes again to mine.
“I think—I should like you—very much, Monsieur,” she stammered, and turned away into the street. I gazed after her in amazement, for I could have sworn that she had blushed. I watched her until she was out of sight, and then continued on my way, pondering over this new wonder, until I plunged into the fetid quarter near the Halles, and found plenty there to occupy my mind.
In an hour’s time my heart was sick of the task. The tottering buildings, the filthy streets, the sore-eyed, half-naked children swarming with vermin; the hideous creatures who had once been men and women, but who now were merely monsters disguised in forms scarce human; the sickening, penetrating stench which hung over everything; the squalor, disease, corruption, vice, which were evident on every hand—all these filled me with disgust and dismay, for I, reared under the trees and the blue sky, had never dreamed of anything so terrible, and I trembled at the thought that perhaps in one of those filthy holes, reeking with crime and disease, Nanette—my Nanette, dainty, beautiful, innocent—might be concealed. The thought turned my heart sick within me, and I pushed on from street to street, looking to right and left, mad with horror and despair.