me to the office, to see the
book in which the arrival of the infant had been noted down, and in that
way to have the address of the nurse. That proved quite an undertaking.
But at last he succeeded, and found it was a Madame Foucart, and that in
1850 she lived on the Rue des Deux-Ecus.

Then he recommenced his hunting up and down. The end of the Rue des
Deux-Ecus had been demolished, and no shopkeeper in the neighbourhood
recollected ever having heard of Madame Foucart. He consulted the
directory, but there was no such name. Looking at every sign as he
walked along, he called on one after another, and at last, in this way,
he had the good fortune to find an old woman, who exclaimed, in answer
to his questions, "What! Do I know Madame Foucart? A most honourable
person, but one who has had many misfortunes. She lives on the Rue de
Censier, quite at the other end of Paris." He hastened there at once.

Warned by experience, he determined now to be diplomatic. But Madame
Foucart, an enormous woman, would not allow him to ask questions in
the good order he had arranged them before going there. As soon as he
mentioned the two names of the child, she seemed to be eager to talk,
and she related its whole history in a most spiteful way. "Ah! the
child was alive! Very well; she might flatter herself that she had for a
mother a most famous hussy. Yes, Madame Sidonie, as she was called since
she became a widow, was a woman of a good family, having, it is said, a
brother who was a minister, but that did not prevent her from being
very bad." And she explained that she had made her acquaintance when she
kept, on the Rue Saint-Honore, a little shop where they dealt in
fruit and oil from Provence, she and her husband, when they came from
Plassans, hoping to make their fortune in the city. The husband died and
was buried, and soon after Madame Sidonie had a little daughter, which
she sent at once to the hospital, and never after even inquired for
her, as she was "a heartless woman, cold as a protest and brutal as a
sheriff's aid." A fault can be pardoned, but not ingratitude! Was not it
true that, obliged to leave her shop as she was so heavily in debt, she
had been received and cared for by Madame Foucart? And when in her turn
she herself had fallen into difficulties, she had never been able to
obtain from Madame Sidonie, even the month's board she owed her, nor the
fifteen francs she had once lent her. To-day the "hateful thing" lived