a few days, I could
not refuse to comply with a wish so cordially expressed, and evidently
sincere. And thus commenced my acquaintance with the Panpans.

I cannot trace the course of our acquaintance, or tell how, from an
occasional call, my visits became those of a bosom friend; but certain it
is, that soon each returning Sunday saw me a guest at the table of
Monsieur Panpan, where my couvert and serviette became sacred to my use;
and, after the meal, were carefully cleaned and laid apart for the next
occasion. This, I afterwards learned, was a customary mark of
consideration towards an esteemed friend among the poorer class of
Parisians. I soon learned their history. Their every-day existence was
a simple, easily read story, and not the less simple and touching because
it is the every-day story of thousands of poor French families. Madame
was a stay-maker; and the whole care and responsibility of providing for
the wants and comforts of a sick husband; for her little Victor, her
eldest born; and the monthly stipend of her infant Henri, out at nurse
some hundred leagues from Paris, hung upon the unaided exertions of her
single hands, and the scrupulous and wonderful economy of her management.

One day I found Madame in tears. Panpan himself lay with rigid features,
and his wiry hands spread out upon the counterpane. Madame was at first
inconsolable and inexplicable, but at length, amid sobs, half suppressed,
related the nature of their new misfortune. Would Monsieur believe that
those miserable nurse-people, insulting as they were, had sent from the
country to say, that unless the three months nursing of little Henri,
together with the six pounds of lump sugar, which formed part of the
original bargain, were immediately paid, cette pauvre bete (Henri that
was), would be instantly dispatched to Paris, and proceedings taken for
the recovery of the debt? Ces miserables!

Here poor Madame Panpan could not contain herself, but gave way to her
affliction in a violent outburst of tears. And yet the poor child, the
cause of all this sorrow, was almost as great stranger to his mother as
he was to me, who had never seen him in my life. With scarcely a week's
existence to boast of, he had been swaddled up in strange clothes;
intrusted to strange hands; and hurried away some hundred leagues from
the capital, to scramble about the clay floor of an unwholesome cottage,
in company perhaps with some half-dozen atomies like