Also, he found something else: A child--a girl eight years old--playing in a heap of charred faggots in the chimney; a child who told him that she was hungry, and that there was no food at all in the place.
"Whose is the brat?" he asked of his wife, knowing very well that, at least, it was not hers, since it must of a certainty have been born three years before he went "into retreat" on the Mediterranean. "Whose? Have you grown so rich that you adopt children now; or is it paid for, eh?"
"It is paid for," the patient creature said, shuddering at the man's return, since she had hoped that he had died in the galley and would never, consequently, wander back to Paris to molest her. "Paid for, and will be----"
"Badly paid for, at least, since its adoption leads you to no better circumstances than these in which I find you. Give me some food. I have eaten nothing for hours."
"Nor I; nor the child there. Not for twenty-four hours. I have not a sol; nor anything to sell."
The man looked at his wife from under bushy black eyebrows--though eyebrows not much blacker than his baked face; then he thrust his hand into his pocket and drew forth five sols and weighed them in his hands as though they were gold pieces. He had stolen them that morning from the basket of a blind man sleeping in the sun outside St. Roch, when no one was looking.
"Go, buy bread," he said. "Get something. I am starving. Go."
"Bread--with these! They will not buy enough for one. And we are so hungry, she and I. See, the child weeps for hunger. Have you no more?"
"Not a coin. Have you?"
"Alas! God, He knows! Nothing. And we are dying of hunger."