e
Flechembault gate; others, at daybreak, by the old Basee gate. A poor
man found her gold cross hanging on the stone cross in the field where
the fair is held. It was that ornament which had wrought her ruin, in
'61. It was a gift from the handsome Vicomte de Cormontreuil, her first
lover. Paquette had never been willing to part with it, wretched as she
had been. She had clung to it as to life itself. So, when we saw that
cross abandoned, we all thought that she was dead. Nevertheless, there
were people of the Cabaret les Vantes, who said that they had seen her
pass along the road to Paris, walking on the pebbles with her bare feet.
But, in that case, she must have gone out through the Porte de Vesle,
and all this does not agree. Or, to speak more truly, I believe that
she actually did depart by the Porte de Vesle, but departed from this
world."

"I do not understand you," said Gervaise.

"La Vesle," replied Mahiette, with a melancholy smile, "is the river."

"Poor Chantefleurie!" said Oudarde, with a shiver,--"drowned!"

"Drowned!" resumed Mahiette, "who could have told good Father
Guybertant, when he passed under the bridge of Tingueux with the
current, singing in his barge, that one day his dear little Paquette
would also pass beneath that bridge, but without song or boat.

"And the little shoe?" asked Gervaise.

"Disappeared with the mother," replied Mahiette.

"Poor little shoe!" said Oudarde.

Oudarde, a big and tender woman, would have been well pleased to sigh in
company with Mahiette. But Gervaise, more curious, had not finished her
questions.

"And the monster?" she said suddenly, to Mahiette.

"What monster?" inquired the latter.

"The little gypsy monster left by the sorceresses in Chantefleurie's
chamber, in exchange for her daughter. What did you do with it? I hope
you drowned it also."

"No." replied Mahiette.

"What? You burned it then? In sooth, that is more just. A witch child!"

"Neither the one nor the other, Gervaise. Monseigneur the archbishop
interested himself in the child of Egypt, exorcised it, blessed it,
removed the devil carefully from its body, and sent it to Paris, to be
exposed on the wooden bed at Notre-Dame, as a foundling."

"Those bishops!" grumbled Gervaise, "because they are learned, they do
nothing like anybody else. I just put it to you, Oudarde, the idea of
placing the devil among the foundlings! For that little monster was
assuredly the devil. Well, Mahiette,