"Yes, yes, I see," said the Chourineur.
"'My pretty little maid,' said the ogress and her old companions, 'come and lodge with us; we will give you good clothes, and then you may amuse yourself.' I didn't like them, and refused, saying to myself, 'I know how to sew very well, and I have two hundred francs in hand. I have been eight years in prison, I should like to enjoy myself a bit,—that won't hurt anybody; work will come when the money is spent.' And so I began to spend my two hundred francs. Ah, that was my mistake," added Fleur-de-Marie, with a sigh. "I ought first to have got my work; but I hadn't a soul on earth to advise me. At sixteen, to be thrown on the city of Paris, as I was, one is so lonely; and what is done is done. I have done wrong, and I have suffered for it. I began then to spend my money: first, I bought flowers to put in my room,—I do love flowers!—then I bought a gown, a nice shawl, and I took a walk in the Bois de Boulogne, and I went to St. Germains, Vincennes, and other country places. Oh, how I love the country!"
"With a lover by your side, my girl?" asked the Chourineur.
"Oh, mon Dieu! no! I like to be my own mistress. I had my little excursions with a friend who was in prison with me,—a good little girl as can be: they call her Rigolette, because she is always laughing."
"Rigolette! Rigolette! I don't know her," said the Chourineur, who appeared to be appealing to his memory.
"I didn't think you knew her. I am sure Rigolette was very well behaved in prison, and always so gay and so industrious, she took out with her when she left the prison at least four hundred francs that she had earned. And then she is so particular!—you should see her! When I say I had no one to advise me, I am wrong: I ought to have listened to her; for, after having had a week's amusement together, she said to me, 'Now we have had such a holiday, we ought to try for work, and not spend our money in waste.' I, who was so happy in the fields and the woods,—it was just at the end of spring, this year,—I answered, 'Oh, I must be idle a little longer, and then I will work hard.' Since that time I have not seen Rigolette, but I heard a few days since that she was living near the Temple,—that she was a famous needlewoman, and earned at least twenty-five sous a-day, and has a small workroom of her own; but now I could not for the world see her again,—I should die with shame if I met her."
"So, then, my poor girl," said Rodolph, "you spent your money in the country,—you like the country, do you?"
"Like it? I love it! Oh, what would I not give to live there? Rigolette, on the contrary, prefers Paris, and likes to walk on the Boulevards; but she is so nice and so kind, she went into the country only to please me."
"And you did not even leave yourself a few sous to live upon whilst you found work?" said the Chourineur.
"Yes, I had reserved about fifty francs; but it happened that I had for my washerwoman a woman called Lorraine, a poor thing, with none but the good God to protect her. She was then very near her confinement, and yet was obliged all day long to be with her hands and feet in her washing-tubs. She fell sick, and, not being able to work, applied for admittance to a lying-in hospital, but there was no room. She could not work, and her time was very near at hand, and she had not a son to pay for the bed in a garret, from which they drove her. Fortunately, she met one day, at the end of the Pont Notre-Dame, with Goubin's wife, who had been hiding for four days in a cellar of a house which was being pulled down behind the Hôtel Dieu—"