The hour for their departure arrived: not without abundant tears did the kind-hearted peasant part from the dumb girl and little Frédéric.
"You would leave us, my child," she said; "I'm very much afraid you're making a mistake. You're going to an enormous city. People there won't be so much interested in you as the folks in our village are. But don't forget us. Send us word how you're getting along, through Monsieur de Montreville, who seems to be very fond of you; and if the time should ever come when you're miserable and unhappy, why, come right back to us; you'll always be as welcome as a child of our own."
Sister Anne kissed the good woman affectionately; then, with her son in her arms, she entered the carriage that was to take her to Paris.
XXVII
THE DILIGENCE.—SISTER ANNE IN PARIS
A young woman who has never been away from her cabin in the woods until she is sixteen years of age, whose condition makes her peculiarly unfamiliar with the world and its customs, must experience countless novel sensations when she finds herself for the first time surrounded by strangers in one of those rolling houses that bear us through city and country.
Such was the case with Sister Anne, who was not eighteen and a half when she left Lyon for Paris with her little son of twenty-one months. Seated in the inmost corner of the conveyance, with her child on her knees, she dared not look at her fellow travellers, and blushed when she saw that they were scrutinizing her.
Her youth, her beauty, her manifest affection for her son, were certain to make her interesting in the eyes of every sympathetic person. But one finds little of that quality in a diligence, and the people about Sister Anne did not seem abundantly provided with it. At her left was a tradesman who talked incessantly of his business, with another tradesman who sat opposite him. The course of shares, the price of sugar, coffee, and cochineal, the transactions that were carried through at the last market, engrossed these gentlemen so completely that they did not even find time to apologize to their neighbors when, in their gesticulations, they stuck an elbow into their ribs or a snuff-box into their faces. At her right, our young mother had a man of some forty years, with a long, gaunt face and an oblique glance, who talked little, but seemed to be listening and trying to become acquainted with his neighbors. Opposite him was a woman of fifty, in an old, stained silk dress, with a dilapidated velvet hat embellished by feathers which resembled fish bones; her bloated face was daubed with rouge, mouches, and snuff. This lady had told her fellow passengers, within ten minutes after starting, that, having played ingénue parts at Strasbourg, princesses at Caen, amoureuses at Saint-Malo, shepherdesses at Quimper, queens at Nantes, noble mothers at Noisy-le-Sec, and jeunes premières at Troyes, she was on her way to Paris to take the grande coquette parts at the Théâtre des Funambules; and that she expected to obtain at once an order permitting her to make her début at the Comédie-Française, which she had been soliciting for thirty-six years. Lastly, beside the would-be débutante was a stout man, who slept most of the time, waking up now and then only to say:
"Oh! we're going over! I thought we had upset!"
An exceedingly pleasant neighbor in a diligence.
During the first few moments, Sister Anne heard nothing but a confused jumble of words which she could not understand, the tradesmen's talk of indigo and cochineal being inextricably mingled with the adventures of the grande coquette, who paused only to take snuff and say to her neighbor the sleeper: