Then she would say to me in a low tone:  “Let us go.”  And we would leave, she walking quickly with lowered head between the drinkers who watched her going by with a look of displeasure.  And as soon as we got into the street she would give a great sigh of relief, as if we had escaped some terrible danger.

Sometimes she would ask me with a shudder: 

“Suppose they, should say something rude to me in those places, what would you do?” “Why, I would defend you, parbleu!” I would reply in a resolute manner.  And she would squeeze my arm for happiness, perhaps with a vague wish that she might be insulted and protected, that she might see men fight on her account, even those men, with me!

One evening as we sat at a table in a tavern at Montmartre, we saw an old woman in tattered garments come in, holding in her hand a pack of dirty cards.  Perceiving a lady, the old woman at once approached us and offered to tell my friend’s fortune.  Emma, who in her heart believed in everything, was trembling with longing and anxiety, and she made a place beside her for the old woman.

The latter, old, wrinkled, her eyes with red inflamed rings round them, and her mouth without a single tooth in it, began to deal her dirty cards on the table.  She dealt them in piles, then gathered them up, and then dealt them out again, murmuring indistinguishable words.  Emma, turning pale, listened with bated breath, gasping with anxiety and curiosity.

The fortune-teller broke silence.  She predicted vague happenings:  happiness and children, a fair young man, a voyage, money, a lawsuit, a dark man, the return of some one, success, a death.  The mention of this death attracted the younger woman’s attention.  “Whose death?  When?  In what manner?”

The old woman replied:  “Oh, as to that, these cards are not certain enough.  You must come to my place to-morrow; I will tell you about it with coffee grounds which never make a mistake.”

Emma turned anxiously to me: 

“Say, let us go there to-morrow.  Oh, please say yes.  If not, you cannot imagine how worried I shall be.”

I began to laugh.

“We will go if you wish it, dearie.”

The old woman gave us her address.  She lived on the sixth floor, in a wretched house behind the Buttes-Chaumont.  We went there the following day.

Her room, an attic containing two chairs and a bed, was filled with strange objects, bunches of herbs hanging from nails, skins of animals, flasks and phials containing liquids of various colors.  On the table a stuffed black cat looked out of eyes of glass.  He seemed like the demon of this sinister dwelling.

Emma, almost fainting with emotion, sat down on a chair and exclaimed: 

“Oh, dear, look at that cat; how like it is to Misti.”

And she explained to the old woman that she had a cat “exactly like that, exactly like that!”

The old woman replied gravely: