“Oh, no! I nevaire say my muzzaire is dead.”
“But isn’t she?”
“I don’t know. I have not hear of her for many year. I leave wiz my fazzaire when I was leetle girls, before he put me in the couvent. My fazzaire get separation from my muzzaire. She’s very bad womans. She’s beat my fazzaire very cruel, so’s he get separation. My fazzaire was poet.”
“And your mother?”
“Oh, she was not at all chic. She was what we call ‘merchant of the four seasons.’”
“Good heavens! You don’t mean one of those women that hawk stuff in the street with hand barrows?”
Anastasia nodded gravely.
I shuddered. Father a cabaret poet; mother a street pedlar of cabbages and onions. Sacré mud! Then a sudden suspicion curdled my blood.
“Tell me,” I demanded, “is it not that your mother’s name is Séraphine?”
“Yes,” she exclaimed, amazedly.