“Is that all?” I asked.

She hesitated.

“Oh, I think Florentin belongs to him.”

“Who is Florentin?”

“My little boy.”

“Oh!  Well, then, you made the boating man believe that he was the father, did you not?”

“You bet!”

“Did he have any money, this boating man?”

“Yes, he left me an income of three hundred francs, settled on Florentin.”

I was beginning to be amused and resumed: 

“All right, my girl, all right.  You are all of you less stupid than one would imagine, all the same.  And how old is he now, Florentin?”

She replied: 

“He is now twelve.  He will make his first communion in the spring.”

“That is splendid.  And since then you have carried on your business conscientiously?”

She sighed in a resigned manner.

“I must do what I can.”

But a loud noise just then coming from the room itself made me start up with a bound.  It sounded like some one falling and picking themselves up again by feeling along the wall with their hands.

I had seized the candle and was looking about me, terrified and furious.  She had risen also and was trying to hold me back to stop me, murmuring: 

“That’s nothing, my dear, I assure you it’s nothing.”

But I had discovered what direction the strange noise came from.  I walked straight towards a door hidden at the head of the bed and I opened it abruptly and saw before me, trembling, his bright, terrified eyes opened wide at sight of me, a little pale, thin boy seated beside a large wicker chair off which he had fallen.

As soon as he saw me he began to cry.  Stretching out his arms to his mother, he cried: 

“It was not my fault, mamma, it was not my fault.  I was asleep, and I fell off.  Do not scold me, it was not my fault.”

I turned to the woman and said: 

“What does this mean?”

She seemed confused and worried, and said in a broken voice: 

“What do you want me to do?  I do not earn enough to put him to school!  I have to keep him with me, and I cannot afford to pay for another room, by heavens!  He sleeps with me when I am alone.  If any one comes for one hour or two he can stay in the wardrobe; he keeps quiet, he understands it.  But when people stay all night, as you have done, it tires the poor child to sleep on a chair.

“It is not his fault.  I should like to see you sleep all night on a chair—­you would have something to say.”

She was getting angry and excited and was talking loud.

The child was still crying.  A poor delicate timid little fellow, a veritable child of the wardrobe, of the cold, dark closet, a child who from time to time was allowed to get a little warmth in the bed if it chanced to be unoccupied.

I also felt inclined to cry.

And I went home to my own bed.