“Do whatever you want to, and let me alone.”
Frimousset would ask no further questions; when by dint of being submissive he had irritated his wife, she never failed to say: “Do whatever you please and let me alone.” Thereupon Nicole’s husband would go off to the wine-shop and pass the day there. Nicole would look in vain for him in the pasture and the garden, and at night, when he came home to supper she would ask:
“Where on earth have you been working? I couldn’t find you anywhere.”
And Jacquinot would reply in a cajoling tone:
“Faith, you wouldn’t tell me what work to begin on, and I was afraid of doing something wrong; I didn’t want to do anything without your orders.”
With a man of Frimousset’s stamp, comfort, when it exists, soon gives place to straitened circumstances, and then to poverty; among the small as among the great, there is no fortune which is large enough to withstand disorder. After five years of married life, Nicole was obliged to sell her field and her pasture, all because Monsieur Jacquinot never knew where to begin when it was a question of working.
Meanwhile Nicole had seen her family increased by three small boys, healthy boys with excellent appetites. Three children more and several pieces of land less could not bring comfort to Frimousset’s home. Then it was that Nicole conceived the idea of becoming a nurse; and as the peasant was as active and determined as her husband was lazy and shiftless, her plan was soon carried out.
And that was why Jasmin, when he went to Rue Sainte-Apolline, to the Nurses’ Bureau, had found the peasant from Gagny, whom he had selected because of her pleasant face, and whom he had carried in triumph to his master, the Marquis de Grandvilain.
Nicole was an excellent woman, and she became sincerely attached to the child that was placed in her charge; she took him as soon as he cried, and was never weary of giving him the breast and of dancing him in her arms; she took care too that he should always be neat and clean. But the peasant woman was a mother too; she had three gas—that is what she called them,—and despite all her affection for her nursling, it was to her gas that Nicole gave the sweetmeats, the preserves, the biscuit and the gingerbread of which Madame la Marquise de Grandvilain had not failed to give her an abundant supply, urging her not to spare them, never to deny Chérubin anything, and to send to her for other delicacies when those should be exhausted.
Luckily for Chérubin, Nicole did not follow to the letter the instructions that were given her. As one is a mother before being a nurse, the peasant woman necessarily had more affection for her children than for her foster-child. She gave milk to the latter, while the others stuffed themselves with dainties, candy and gingerbread, which soon upset their health, whereas, on the contrary, little Grandvilain became fresh and rosy and plump and hearty.