On a tour which he and Hugo, accompanied by their wives, made together in the south of France, they arrived at an inn in the little town of Essonne, where they were to breakfast. It was in this inn that Lesurques had been arrested, a man who was executed in 1796 for a murder of which he was afterwards proved to have been innocent. Nodier, who had known him, or at any rate said he had, spoke of him with an emotion that brought tears into the eyes of the two ladies, and disturbed the cheerfulness of the repast. Noticing Madame Hugo's wet eyes, Nodier promptly began: "You know, Madame, that a man is not invariably certain of being the father of his child, but have you ever heard of a woman not knowing if she is her child's mother?" "Where did you hear of such a thing?" asked Madame Hugo. "In the billiard-room next door," was the reply. Pressed for an explanation, Nodier related with much gusto how, two years previously, a coachful of wet-nurses, coming from Paris with children who were to be reared in the country, stopped at this very inn. That they might breakfast in peace, the nurses deposited their charges for the time on the billiard-table. But whilst the women were in the _salle-à-manger_ some carriers, coming in to play a game of billiards, lifted the children off the table and laid them at random on the bench. When the nurses returned they were in despair. How was each to recognise her own nursling? The children were all only a few days old, and indistinguishable one from the other. At last, merely making sure of the sex, each took one from the row; and now there were in France a score or so of mothers who discovered a likeness to beloved husbands or to themselves in children with whom they had no connection whatever. "What a story!" said Madame Nodier. "Were the children's clothes not marked?" "If you begin to inquire into the probability of a thing, you will never arrive at the truth," answered Nodier, nothing daunted, and quite satisfied with the effect produced. He himself never inquired into probabilities. The world of probabilities was not his; he lived in the world of legend, of fantastic fairy-tale and ghost story. If a fairy has ever stood by the cradle of a mortal, that mortal was Charles Nodier. And in this fairy he believed all his life; he loved her as she loved him, and she had a part in all that he wrote. What though he was married by law and in earthly fashion to Madame Nodier! The marriage had no more spiritual significance than Dante's with Gemma Donati; his true bride and Beatrice was the fairy Bellas, once the Queen of Sheba, whose praises he and Gérard de Nerval so often sang.