They looked in your hand, and prophesied most wonderful things—they were quite bold enough to have foretold to Judas that he would be Pope. At the same time, there were ugly stories about them—of stolen children, and cutpurses, and the eating of human flesh. The prudent warned the foolish, and said, ’Go not near them!’ and then went themselves by stealth. Everybody was carried away by it. In sober truth, they told you things to have amazed a Cardinal! The mothers made much of their children after the gipsy women had read in their hands all manner of miracles written in Pagan and in Turkish. One had an Emperor, another a Pope, a third a Captain. Poor Chantefleurie caught the fever of curiosity. She wanted to know what she had got, and whether her pretty little Agnès would not one day be Empress of Armenia or the like. So she carried her to the Egyptians, and the Egyptian women admired the child, fondled it, kissed it with their black mouths, and were lost in wonder over its little hands—alas! to the great joy of its mother. Above all, they were delighted with its pretty feet and pretty shoes. The child was not yet a year old, and was just beginning to prattle a word or two—laughed and crowed at her mother—was fat and round, and had a thousand little gestures of the angels in Paradise. The child was frightened at the black gipsy woman, and cried; but the mother only kissed her the more, and carried her away, overjoyed at the good fortune the prophetess had foretold to her Agnès. She would become a famous beauty—a wonder—a queen. So she returned to her garret in the Rue Folle-Peine, proud to bring back with her a queen. The next day she seized a moment when the child was asleep on her bed—for it always slept with her—left the door ajar, and ran to tell a neighbour in the Rue de la Séchesserie that the day would come when her daughter Agnès would be served at her table by the King of England and the Duke of Ethiopia, and a hundred other surprises. On her return, hearing no sound as she mounted her stair, she said, ’Good, the child is still asleep.’ She found the door more open than she had left it; she entered, and ran to the bed—poor mother!—the child was gone, the place empty. There was no trace left of the child, excepting one of its little shoes. She fled out of the room and down the stairs and began beating her head against the wall, crying: ’My child! Who has my child? Who has taken my child from me?’ The street was empty, the house stood by itself, no one could tell her anything. She hastened through the city, searching every street, running hither and thither the whole day, mad, distraught, terrible to behold, looking in at every door and every window like a wild beast robbed of its young. She was breathless, dishevelled, terrifying, with a flame in her eyes that dried her tears. She stopped the passers- by and cried, ’My child! my child! my pretty little girl! To him who will restore my child to me I will be a servant, the servant of his dog—and he may eat my heart if he will!’ She met Monsieur the Curé of Saint-Rémy, and to him she said: ’Monsieur the Curé, I will dig the earth with my nails, but give me back my child!’ Oudarde, it was heart-rending, and I saw a very hard man, Maître Ponce Lacabre the attorney, shedding tears. Ah, the poor mother! At night she returned to her home. During her absence, a neighbour had seen two Egyptian women steal up her stair with a bundle in their arms, then come down again after closing the door, and hasten away. Afterward she had heard something that sounded like a child’s cry from Paquette’s room. The mother broke into mad laughter, sprang up the stair as if she had wings, burst open the door like an explosion of artillery, and entered the room. Horrible to relate, Oudarde, instead of her sweet little Agnès, so rosy and fresh, a gift from Heaven, a sort of hideous little monster, crippled, one-eyed, all awry, was crawling and whimpering on the floor. She covered her eyes in horror.
“ ’Ah!’ she cried, ’can these sorceresses have changed my little girl into this frightful beast?’ They removed the misshapen lump as quickly as possible out of her sight; it would have driven her mad. It was a boy, the monstrous offspring of some Egyptian woman and the Foul Fiend, about four years old, and speaking a language like no human tongue, impossible to understand. La Chantefleurie had thrown herself upon the little shoe, all that remained to her of her heart’s delight, and lay so long motionless, without a word or a breath, that we thought she was dead. But suddenly her whole body began to tremble, and she fell to covering her relic with frantic kisses, sobbing the while as if her heart would break. I do assure you, we were all weeping with her as she cried: ’Oh, my little girl! my pretty little girl! where art thou?’ It rent the very soul to hear her; I weep now when I think of it. Our children, look you, are the very marrow of our bones.—My poor little Eustache, thou too art so beautiful!—Could you but know how clever he is! It was but yesterday he said to me, ’Mother, I want to be a soldier.’—Oh, my Eustache, what if I were to lose thee!—Well, of a sudden, La Chantefleurie sprang to her feet and ran through the streets of the town crying: ’To the camp of the Egyptians! to the camp of the Egyptians! Sergeants, to burn the