and to go on working in humble service attending on a priest until he died, then going to live with his sister, remaining with her until she died, and saving during all these long twenty years only four-and-twenty pounds—­all the money she had when she returned to the little seaport town whence she had come:  a little seaport town where the aged poor starved in the streets, or in garrets in filth and vermin, without hope of relief from any one.

It was to this cruel little village, of which there are many along the French coast, and along every coast in the world, that Jeanne returned to rent a garret with an old and bedridden woman, unable to help herself.  Without the poor to help the poor the poor would not be able to live, and this old woman lived by the work of Jeanne’s hands for many a year, Jeanne going every morning to the market-place to find some humble employment, finding it sometimes, returning at other times desperate, but concealing her despair from her bedridden companion, telling her as gaily as might be that they would have to do without any dinner that day.  So did they live until two little seamstresses—­women inspired by the same pity for the poor as Jeanne herself—­heard of her, and asked the cure, in whom this cruel little village had inspired an equal pity, to send for Jeanne.  She was asked to give her help to those in greater need than she—­the blind beggars and such like who prowled about the walls of the churches.

On leaving the priest it is related that she said:  “I don’t understand, but I never heard any one speak so beautifully.”  But next day when she went to see the priest she understood everything, sufficient at all events for the day which was to take to her garret a blind woman whom the seamstresses had discovered in the last stages of neglect and age.  There was the bedridden woman whom Jeanne supported, and who feared to share Jeanne’s charity with another, and resented the intrusion; she had to be pacified and cajoled with some little present of food, for the aged and hungry are like animals—­ food appeases them, silences many a growl; and the blind woman was given a corner in the garret.  “But how is she to be fed?” was the question put to Jeanne next morning, and from that question the whole Order of the Little Sisters of the Poor started.  Jeanne, inspired suddenly, said, “I will beg for them,” and seizing a basket she went out to beg for broken victuals.

“There is a genius for many things besides the singing of operas, painting pictures, and writing books,” Evelyn said, “and Jeanne’s genius was for begging for her poor people.  And there is nothing more touching in the world’s history than her journey in the milk-cart to the regatta.  You see, dear Mother, she was accustomed to beg from door to door among squalid streets, stopping a passer-by, stooping under low doorways, intruding everywhere, daring everything among her own people, but frightened by the fashionable folk en grande toilette