"I was not a mother, then?"
"No, not in the full acceptation of the word. However, after making me repeat my questions many times, you told me that you had entrusted your child to a nurse who lived at Saint-Denis. I asked you the woman's name,—you had forgotten it; but I was so persistent that you finally remembered the name: it was Madame Mathieu, the wife of a farm hand. I asked you her address. Oh! then you jumped from your seat in your wrath, as if I had asked you where you had hidden a treasure! Again your memory was at fault. You finally told me that the woman lived near the church on the square, and that that was all you knew."
"Well, what then?"
"Then I went to Saint-Denis myself; I asked for Madame Mathieu, wife of a farm hand; nobody knew such a person. I visited all the houses near the church, and it was impossible for me to discover that nurse. I found two women named Mathieu at Saint-Denis, but one was eighty years old, the other sixty-six; so that neither of them could be the one I was looking for—quite uselessly, for you had lied to me."
"I beg you, monsieur, to choose your expressions more carefully."
"I have no need to be considerate toward you, madame, for I know you and I know what you are, what you are worth.—A melancholy knowledge, for which I have paid very dear!"
"What do you mean by that, monsieur? It seems to me that you never ruined yourself for me."
"Thank God! I left that pleasure to others; but you know very well what I mean.—To resume, madame, you lied when you gave me the address at Saint-Denis of a nurse who never existed."
"I told you all that I knew, monsieur; it was not my fault if the woman had left the place where she once lived."
"Peasants don't move about like lorettes, and if they do happen to change their place of abode, everyone knows everyone else so well in a village, that it is easy to find them."