The woman drank eagerly the glass of milk offered, and then muttered softly to herself.
"It is so warm, I am burning, everywhere there are flames."
The poor woman was crazy, and no one would have ever recognized in her, Louise, the wife of the landlord Jules Fougeres.
The reader will have guessed long since that Louison, the street-singer, was none other than Fanfaro's lost sister. The young girl, however, did not know that the poor woman she so tenderly nursed was her mother.
Louison had once lost herself in the woods, and in her blind fear had run farther and farther until she finally reached an exit. As she stood in a field sobbing bitterly, a man approached her and asked her who she was and where she had come from. The child, exhausted by the excitement of the last few days, could not give a clear answer, and so the man took her on his arm and brought her to his wife, who was waiting for him in a thicket. The man and his wife carried on a terrible trade; they hovered about battlefields to seek prey, and more than one wounded man had been despatched by them if his purse or his watch attracted the robbers' attention. Nevertheless, these "Hyenas of the battlefield" were good and kind to the lost child; they treated her just like their own children, of whom they had three, and at the end of the war, in consequence of the good crop they had secured on the battlefield, they were possessed of sufficient competence to buy a little place in Normandy.
Louison grew up. An old musician, who discovered that she had a magnificent voice, took pride in teaching the child how to sing, and when on Sundays she would sing in the choir, he would enthusiastically exclaim, "Little Louison will be a good songstress some day, her voice sounds far above the others."
An epidemic came to the village soon after, and at the end of two days her foster-parents were carried away, and Louison was once more alone in the world.
The nuns of the neighboring convent took the child, taught it what they knew themselves, and a few years passed peacefully for Louison.
A thirst to see the world took hold of her; the convent walls stifled her, and she implored the nuns to let her wander again. Naturally her request was refused, and so Louison tried to help herself.
One dark, stormy night she clambered over the garden wall, and when the nuns came to wake her next morning for early mass, they found her bed empty and the room vacant.