with
a wheelwright, a certain Montoir, residing at Saint-Pierre, a hamlet in
the vicinity of Rougemont. Thus the lad lived; he was fifteen years old,
and that was all. Mathieu could obtain no further information respecting
either his physical health or his morality.

When Mathieu found himself in the street again, slightly dazed, he
remembered that La Couteau had told him that the child would be sent
to Rougemont. He had always pictured it dying there, carried off by the
hurricane which killed so many babes, and lying in the silent village
cemetery paved with little Parisians. To find the boy alive, saved
from the massacre, came like a surprise of destiny, and brought vague
anguish, a fear of some terrible catastrophe to Mathieu's heart. At the
same time, since the boy was living, and he now knew where to seek him,
he felt that he must warn Beauchene. The matter was becoming serious,
and it seemed to him that he ought not to carry the inquiry any further
without the father's authorization.

That same day, then, before returning to Chantebled, he repaired to
the factory, where he was lucky enough to find Beauchene, whom Blaise's
absence on business had detained there by force. Thus he was in a very
bad humor, puffing and yawning and half asleep. It was nearly three
o'clock, and he declared that he could never digest his lunch properly
unless he went out afterwards. The truth was that since his rupture with
his wife he had been devoting his afternoons to paying attentions to a
girl serving at a beer-house.

"Ah! my good fellow," he muttered as he stretched himself. "My blood is
evidently thickening. I must bestir myself, or else I shall be in a bad
way."

However, he woke up when Mathieu had explained the motive of his visit.
At first he could scarcely understand it, for the affair seemed to him
so extraordinary, so idiotic.

"Eh? What do you say? It was my wife who spoke to you about that child?
It is she who has taken it into her head to collect information and
start a search?"

His fat apoplectical face became distorted, his anger was so violent
that he could scarcely stutter. When he heard, however, of the mission
with which his wife had intrusted Mathieu, he at last exploded: "She
is mad! I tell you that she is raving mad! Were such fancies ever seen?
Every morning she invents something fresh to distract me!"

Without heeding this interruption, Mathieu quietly finished his
narrative: "And so I have just come