Charles Perrault smiled, but there was a touch of sadness in the smile. "Ah, dear children," said he, "it is very long since I wrote a fairy tale, and I am not as young as I was then. You see I require a stick to enable me to get along, and am bent almost double, and can walk but very, very slowly. My eyes are so dim, I can hardly distinguish your little merry faces; my ear can hardly catch the sound of your voices; nor is my mind what it was. My imagination has lost its vigor and freshness; memory itself has nearly deserted me; but I love you dearly, and like to give you pleasure. However, I doubt if my poor bald head could now make a fairy tale for you, so I will tell you one which I heard so often from my mother that I think I can repeat it word for word."
The children joyfully gathered round the old man, who passed his hands for a moment across his wrinkled brow, and began the story as follows:
My mother and your great-grandmother, Madeline Geoffrey, was the daughter of a linendraper, who, at the time I speak of, had been residing for three years in the Rue des Bourdonnais, close to the Cemetery of the Innocents. One evening, having gone alone to vespers at the church of St. Eustace, as she was hastening home to her mother, who had been prevented by illness from accompanying her, she heard a great noise at the top of the street, and looking up saw an immense mob hurrying along, shouting and hooting. As they were then in the midst of the troubles of the Fronde, Madeline in alarm hurried toward the house, and having opened the door by a latch-key, was turning to close it, when she was startled on seeing behind her a woman wrapped in a black mantle holding two children by the hand. This woman rushed past Madeline into the shop, exclaiming, "In the name of all you hold most dear, save me! Hide me and my children in some corner of your house! However helpless and unfortunate I may appear at this moment, doubt not my power to prove my gratitude to you."
"I should want no reward for helping the distressed," said Madeline, deeply touched by the mother's agony; "but poor protection can this house afford against a brutal mob." The stranger cast a hurried and tearful glance around; when, suddenly uttering a cry of joy, she fixed her eye upon part of the floor almost concealed by the shop counter, and rushing to the spot, exclaimed, "I have it!—I have it!" As she spoke, she lifted a trap-door contrived in the floor, opening on a stone staircase which led to a subterranean passage; and snatching up her children in her arms, darted down into the gulf, leaving my mother stupefied with astonishment. But the cries of the mob, who had by this time reached the shop, and were clamorously demanding admittance, roused her; and quickly closing the trap-door, she called her father who came down in great alarm.
After a short parley, he opened the door, which they were beginning to force. The mob consisted of two or three hundred miserable tattered wretches, who poured into the house; and after searching every corner of it, without finding any thing, were so furious with disappointment, that they seized upon Madeline and her father.
"Deliver up to us the woman we are looking for!" they exclaimed. "She is a vile sorceress—an enemy to the citizens of Paris; she takes the part of the hated Austrian against us; she is the cause of all the famine and misery that is desolating Paris. We must have her and her children, that we may wreak just vengeance on them!"
"We know not who you mean," replied my grandfather, who, in truth, was quite ignorant of what had occurred; "we have not seen any one—no one has entered the house."
"We know how to make such obstinate old wretches speak," exclaimed one of the ringleaders. He seized my mother, and pointing a loaded pistol at her breast, cried, "The woman! We want the woman!"
At this moment Madeline, being exactly over the trap-door, heard a slight rustle underneath; and fearing that it would betray the stranger's hiding-place, endeavored to drown the noise from below by stamping with her foot, while she boldly replied, "I have no one to give up to you."