Put out to nurse in a small village of Picardie, near Abbeville, she evidently possessed little interest for them, for they had forgotten to pay the woman who had undertaken to replace her mother. The nurse was patient for a long while, but after three years, hearing nothing from her nursling’s parents, and being too poor to add a little stranger to her numerous family, the woman was about to leave the child at the Foundling Hospital, when an old lady who was passing through the village, touched with compassion for the deserted little one, offered the nurse to take charge of her and to take her to Paris with her. The nurse assented, and took the lady’s address, in order that she might write to her if the child’s parents should ever claim her. But who were her parents? To the lady’s question the peasant woman replied: “Faith, I hardly know, or rather I don’t know, at all. As to the mother, I am very sure I never saw her. I was at the nurses’ bureau on Rue Sainte-Apolline; a fine gentleman--I guess he was a servant--came into the place, while I was taking the air in the yard; I was the first one he saw, and he asked me if I wanted to take a brat that was born the night before. I says yes; then he says: ‘I don’t need to look any further; you’ll do as well as another; take your bundle and come.’--I went with him; there was a carriage at the door, and I got in with the swell servant. We drove to a street I don’t know the name of, he took me into a house, with a concierge, and up to the second floor, into a handsome room. I found a gentleman there, very well dressed, a pretty man with a fine figure; he had a splendid gold chain sticking out of his fob. He was a young man, about thirty-two or thirty-three, more or less. And when he saw the man come in who had brought me there, he says: “‘Come, make haste, Comtois! I don’t know what to do with the child! It has been crying until it has burst the drum of my ear, but I can’t nurse it. Have you brought a nurse at last?’ “‘Yes, monsieur, here’s one who will take charge of the little girl.’ “‘Ah! that is very lucky!’ “And with that the gentleman, without even looking at me to see how I was built and whether I had much milk, motioned to me to go with him into another room, where I saw a little girl, just come into the world, wriggling on a sofa with cushions; they didn’t even have a cradle for her. The gentleman says to me: “‘Take this child and carry it away at once, for it cries enough to split one’s head.’ “To that I answers: “‘It will be twenty francs a month, without counting sugar and soap!’ “‘All right, that’s understood,’ he says; and he puts a hundred francs in my hand, saying: ‘This is for the first expenses; don’t you be afraid, I’ll send you money, you shall have plenty of it.’ “At that I makes another reverence and says: