"Why, what is this?" she exclaimed as she caught sight of the sou. "Did you find this? don't you know what it is?"
"I know what it is, madam; it was given to me to buy some sausage with to flavor my bread."
"To flavor your bread, you little beggar! Good bread's not good enough for you, then! I'll flavor your bread, you idiot." And with her strong right hand she dealt him a blow on the side of the head that felled him instantly to the floor.
He hid his bruised face in his little trembling hands and lay there weeping silently.
"Get up, get up, you idle dog; you're not going to stay there, I can tell you! Come, take your basket and hook and be off again." The unfeeling woman pulled up the wretched child as she spoke. "What! crying! I'll have none of that! Come, be off! You'll get no supper, I promise you, until your basket's full again."
Down the crazy staircase once more the little orphan stumbled into the street—hungry and tired, his cheek blue with the cruel blow, and his young heart swelling with the sense of so much injustice and oppression. The thought came to him suddenly that he would not return again to that wicked woman; but then, where should he go? Who would take care of him? He wandered through many dirty, narrow streets while he thus meditated, and at last found himself before the old church of St. Etienne du Mont. He saw some children going in, and followed them. There was so profound a silence in the sacred edifice, such a soft, subdued light streamed in from the beautiful painted windows, that the child's agitated, angry heart seemed calmed almost by a miracle. He slunk into a dark corner, and there, doing as he saw the happier children with whom he had entered do, he knelt. He did not pray; he had never known a mother's care, never been taught to lisp "Our Father who art in heaven" at his mother's knee; but peace and forgiveness entered into the orphan's soul as he knelt, silent, unheeded, in that dark corner of God's house.
Half an hour after he slunk out again into the street, feeling better, he knew not why, poor ignorant boy, and only anxious to try to satisfy his task-mistress.
All the evening he went to and fro, filling his basket from the heaps of rubbish thrown into the streets as soon as night comes by the numerous inhabitants of Parisian houses. At last, when ten o'clock had struck from all the church-towers in the quarter, he again climbed to the third story. The door was ajar, he entered softly, and saw, by the light of a gas-lamp that was on the opposite side of the street, Pelagie Vautrin lying extended on her bed, and snoring the heavy sleep of the drunkard.
He crept, tired and hungry, to his heap of rags, and soon happily forgot for a few hours that he was motherless and fatherless, a little waif adrift on the sea of life.
Thus passed and ended Marcel's first day of labor.