"Here, pick up your rags and tatters, Mont Saint-Jean."
"Oh, how wicked! Oh, how cruel!" exclaimed the poor ill-used creature, running in every direction after the pieces, which she endeavoured to pick up in spite of pushes and blows. "I never did anybody any harm," she added, weeping. "I have offered, if they would let me alone, to do anything I could for anybody, to give them half my allowance, although I am always so hungry; but, no! no! it's always so. What can I do to be left in peace? They haven't even pity of a poor woman in the family way. They are more cruel than the beasts. Oh, the trouble I had to collect these little bits of linen! How else can I make the clothes for my baby, for I have no money to buy them with? What harm was there in picking up what nobody else wanted when it was thrown away?" Then Mont Saint-Jean exclaimed suddenly, with a ray of hope, "Oh, there you are, Goualeuse! Now, then, I'm safe; do speak to them for me; they will listen to you, I am sure, for they love you as much as they hate me."
La Goualeuse was the last of the prisoners who entered the enclosure.
Fleur-de-Marie wore the blue woollen gown and black skull-cap of the prisoners; but even in this coarse costume she was still charming. Yet, since her carrying off from the farm of Bouqueval (the consequences of which circumstance we will explain hereafter), her features seemed greatly altered; her pale cheeks, formerly tinged with a slight colour, were as wan as the whiteness of alabaster; the expression, too, of her countenance had changed, and was now imprinted with a kind of dignified grief. Fleur-de-Marie felt that to bear courageously the painful sacrifices of expiation is almost to attain restored position.
"Ask a favour for me, Goualeuse," said poor Mont Saint-Jean, beseechingly, to the young girl; "see how they are flinging about the yard all I had collected, with so much trouble, to begin my baby linen for my child. What good can it do them?"
Fleur-de-Marie did not say a word, but began very actively to pick up, one by one, from under the women's feet, all the rags she could collect. One prisoner ill-temperedly kept her foot on a sort of little bed-gown of coarse woollen cloth. Fleur-de-Marie, still stooping, looked up at the woman, and said to her in a sweet tone:
"I beg of you let me pick it up. I ask it in the name of this poor woman who is weeping."
The prisoner removed her foot. The bed-gown was rescued, as well as most of the other scraps, which La Goualeuse acquired piece by piece. There remained to obtain a small child's cap, which two prisoners were struggling for, and laughing at. Fleur-de-Marie said to them:
"Be all good, pray do. Let me have the little cap."
"Oh, to be sure! It's for a harlequin in swaddling-clothes this cap is! It is made of a bit of gray stuff, with points of green and black fustian, and lined with a bit of an old mattress cover."