"I will at least have with me my two children." The "horse-dealer" began to laugh, shrugged his shoulders, and answered: "Then you didn't hear me? By Jupiter, I advise you not to be deaf--you would be returned to me. I told you that I neither bought nor sold children." "What does that matter to me?" "Among a hundred purchasers of slaves for farm-hands, there would not be ten so foolish as to buy a man and his two children, without their mother. So that to offer you for sale with two brats, if they are still living, would make me lose half your value by burdening your purchaser with two useless mouths. Do you catch on; thick-head? No, for you look at me with a ferocious and stupefied air. I repeat that if I had been obliged to buy the two children in one lot with you, or even if they had been given to me to boot, in the market, like old Pierce-Skin, my first care would have been to have put you up for sale without them. Do you understand at last, double and triple block that you are?" At last I did understand; heretofore I had not dreamed of such refinement of torture in slavery. To think that my two children, if alive, might be sold, I know not where, or to whom, and taken far from me! I had not thought it possible. My heart swelled with grief. So great was my suffering that I almost supplicated the "horse-dealer." I said to him: "You are deceiving me. What can my children do? Who would wish to buy such poor little things, so young? useless mouths--as you said yourself?" "Oh, those who carry on the trade in children have a separate and assured patronage, especially if the children are favored with pretty features. Are your young ones good-looking?" "Yes," I answered in spite of myself. Before me was the vision of the charming fair faces of my little Sylvest and Syomara, who looked as much alike as twins and whom I had embraced a moment before the battle of Vannes. "Oh yes, they were good-looking. They were like their mother, who was so beautiful--!" "If they had good looks, be easy, my fine Bull. They will be easy to dispose of. The dealers in children have for their especial patrons the decrepit and surfeited Roman Senators, who love fresh fruits. By the way, they have announced the near arrival of the patrician Trymalcion, a very rich and very noble man, an old and very capricious expert. He is traveling through the Roman colonies of southern Gaul, and is expected here, they say, on his galley which is as splendid as a palace. No doubt he would like to take back to Italy some graceful specimens of Gallic brats. If your children are pretty, their fate is assured, for the patrician Trymalcion is one of my partner's patrician customers."[19]