Suddenly the superintendent called out to her:  “You have been with la Frieze again!”

The old woman did not reply, but shook with laughter, as she had done just before, and then she ran off, giving the superintendent a look, which said as plainly as words could have done:  “Do you think I care a fig for you?”

Those insulting words were clearly written in her face, and at the same time I noticed that the old woman’s eyes had utterly changed, for during that short moment of bravado the childish eyes had become the eyes of a monkey, of some ferocious, obstinate baboon.

That time, in spite of any dislike to question him further, I could not help saying to him:  “That is Babette, I suppose?”

“Yes,” he replied, growing rather red, as if he guessed that I understood the old woman’s insulting looks.

“Is she the woman who is so precious?” I added, with a touch of irony, which made him grow altogether crimson.

“That is she,” he said, walking on quickly, so as to escape my further questions.

But I was egged on by curiosity, and I made a direct appeal to our host’s complaisance.  “I should like to see this Frieze,” I said.  “Who is Frieze?”

He turned round and said:  “Oh! nothing, nothing, he is not at all interesting.  What is the good of seeing him?  It is not worth while.”

And he ran downstairs, two at a time.  He who was usually so delicate, and so very careful to explain everything, was now in a hurry to get finished, and our visit was cut short.

The next day I had to leave that part of the country, without hearing anything more about Babette, but I came back about four months later, when the shooting season began.  I had not forgotten her during that time, for nobody could ever forget her eyes, and so I was very glad to have as my traveling companion on my three hours’ diligence journey from the station to my friend’s house, a man who talked to me about her all the time.

He was a young magistrate whom I had already met, and who had much interested me by his wit and his close manner of observing things, and by his singularly refined casuistry, and, above all, by the contrast between his professional severity, and his tolerant philosophy.

But he never appeared so attractive to me as he did on that day, when he told me the history of that mysterious Babette.

He had inquired into it, and had applied all his faculties as an examining magistrate to it, for, like me, his visit to the asylum had roused his curiosity.  This is what he had learned and what he told me.

When she was ten years old, Babette had been violated by her own father, and at thirteen she had been sent to the house of correction for vagabondage and debauchery.  From the time she was twenty until she was forty she had been a servant in the neighborhood, frequently changing her situation, and being nearly everywhere her employer’s mistress, and she had ruined several families without getting any money herself, or without gaining any definite position.  A shopkeeper had committed suicide on her account, and a respectable young fellow had turned thief and incendiary, and had finished at the hulks.