"Where else should I be? Then she took up with a tiler, who came to lodge with us. Of the two boys of Mère Madeleine, one, the eldest, was drowned at the Ile des Cygnes, and the other went apprentice to a carpenter."
"And what did you do with this woman?"
"Oh, I helped to draw her barrow, made the soup, and carried her man his dinner; and when he came home drunk, which happened oftener than was his turn, I helped Mère Madeleine to keep him in order, for we still lived in the same apartment. He was as vicious as a sandy-haired donkey, when he was tipsy, and tried to kill us. Once, if we had not snatched his axe from him, he would certainly have murdered us both. Mère Madeleine had a cut on the shoulder, which bled till the room looked like a slaughter-house."
"And how did you become—what—we—are?" said Fleur-de-Marie, hesitatingly.
"Why, little Charley, Madeleine's son, who was afterwards drowned at the Ile des Cygnes, was my first lover, almost from the time when he, his mother, and his brother, came to lodge with us when we were but mere children; after him the tiler was my lover, who threatened else to turn me out-of-doors. I was afraid that Mère Madeleine would also send me away if she discovered anything. She did, however; but as she was really a good creature, she said, 'As it is so, and you are sixteen years old, and fit for nothing, for you are too self-willed to take a situation or learn a business, you shall go with me and be inscribed in the police-books; as you have no relations, I will answer for you, as I brought you up, as one may say; and that will give you a position authorised by the government, and you will have nothing to do but to be merry and dress smart. I shall have no uneasiness about you, and you will no longer be a charge to me. What do you say to it, my girl?' 'Why, I think indeed you are right,' was my answer; 'I had not thought of that.' Well, we went to the Bureau des Mœurs. She answered for me, in the usual way, and from that time I was inscrite. I met Mère Madeleine a year afterwards. I was drinking with my man, and we asked her to join us, and she told us that the tiler had been sentenced to the galleys. Since then I have never seen her, but some one, I don't remember who, declared that she had been seen at the Morgue three months ago. If it were true, really so much the worse, for Mère Madeleine was a good sort of woman,—her heart was in her hand, and she had no more gall than a pigeon."
Fleur-de-Marie, though plunged young in an atmosphere of corruption, had subsequently breathed so pure an air that she experienced a deeply painful sensation at the horrid recital of La Louve. And if we have had the sad courage to make it, it has been because all the world should know that, hideous as it is, it is still a thousand times less revolting than other countless realities.
Ignorance and misery often conduct the lower classes to these fearful degradations, human and social.
Yes; there is a crowd of hovels and dens, where children and adults, girls and boys, legitimate children and bastards, lying pell-mell on the same mattress, have continually before their eyes these infamous examples of drunkenness, violence, debauch, and murder. Yes, and too frequently unnatural crimes at the tenderest age add to this accumulation of horrors.
The rich may shroud their vices in shadow and mystery, and respect the sanctity of the domestic hearth, but the most honest artisans, occupying nearly always a single chamber with their family, are compelled, from want of beds and space, to make their children sleep together, sons and daughters, close to themselves, husbands and wives.
If we shudder at the fatal consequences of such necessity almost inevitably imposed on poor, but honest artisans, what must it be with workpeople depraved by ignorance or misconduct? What fearful examples do they not present to unhappy children, abandoned, or rather excited, from their tenderest youth to every brutal impulse and animal propensity? Have they even the idea of what is right, decent, and modest? Must they not be as strange to social laws as the savages of the New World? Poor creatures! Corrupted at their very birth, who in the prisons, whither their wanderings and idleness often lead them, are already stigmatised by the coarse and terrible metaphor, "Graines de Bagne" (Seeds of the Gaol)! and the metaphor is a correct one. This sinister prediction is almost invariably accomplished: the Galleys or the Bridewell, each sex has its destiny.