“I’ve been alone all day, for the fat, funny man told me I’d best stay inside to-day. He will be coming soon with my supper.” While she was speaking she was making her way back to an open door through which a faint light was gleaming. She was so used to being alone with Minuit that she found it natural to talk to him as though he were a person. A jangle of rough voices came down the alley from the shoemaker’s shop on the corner of the rue Saint Antoine. Vivi was not at all frightened of the voices or their owners, for she knew them. They had been friends of her father and he would have been with them, talking far into the night, had he not been killed the summer before by some pieces of lumber from the big pavilion falling on him. The pavilion had been erected after the storming of the Tuileries and he had been one of hundreds who had offered to help put it up. He was a licorice water seller by profession and all that he had left Vivi of worldly goods was his tin tray and the cups dangling from it. She hoped to make some sous in the spring selling the cooling drink in the streets. Now that the cold weather had come, no one was thirsty enough to drink licorice water, and if it had not been for the fat, foreign stranger, who had taken the room above her and who never failed to bring her something to eat when he came in at night, she would have had to go down the alley to beg a bit of bread from the shoemaker. She went through the open door, climbed a short flight of rickety stairs, and opened a door at the right of the first landing. The room she entered was small and bare. There was a cot in one corner covered with a piece of sacking, a deal table close to a tiny, rude fireplace, and a chair. Some pieces of a broken box lay on the floor near the fireplace. Vivi went over to the cot and put Minuit down on it. Then she went over to the cupboard and threw open its rickety door. There was nothing at all to eat in the cupboard and Vivi made a face at it. She had never heard of Mother Hubbard, but she must have felt very much like her as she saw the bare boards and heard Minuit’s entreating meow. “Never mind, Minuit, the fat man will bring us something to eat. Let us go to sleep under the sacking until he comes.” She picked Minuit up in her arms as she spoke and going to the cot, curled up on it under the sacking. Before she knew it, she and her purring friend were fast asleep. Vivi was awakened by a loud scrambling of rats. She could hear them fighting and chasing each other through the wall as she sat up on the cot and rubbed her eyes. She jumped up and, drawing the cot close to the dusty window with its small jagged corner of broken glass, leaned forward so that she could see down the alley as far as the rue Saint Antoine at the end of it. She did not have to wait very long before she saw a short, stout figure in a long cloak and wide hat coming toward her through the dusk.