“Never mind now what citizen Marat would have wished,” Chauvelin broke in quietly.  “Tell me first who this child is.”

“I do not know, citizen,” she replied.

“How do you mean, you do not know?  Then I pray you, citizeness, what is all this pother about?”

“About the child, citizen,” reiterated Jeannette obstinately.

“What child?”

“The child whom citizen Marat adopted last year and kept at that awful house on the Chemin de Pantin.”

“I did not know citizen Marat had adopted a child,” remarked Chauvelin thoughtfully.

“No one knew,” she rejoined.  “Not even citizeness Evrard.  I was the only one who knew.  I had to go and see the child once every month.  It was a wretched, miserable brat,” the woman went on, her shrivelled old breast vaguely stirred, mayhap, by some atrophied feeling of motherhood.  “More than half-starved ... and the look in its eyes, citizen!  It was enough to make you cry!  I could see by his poor little emaciated body and his nice little hands and feet that he ought never to have been put in that awful house, where—­”

She paused, and that quick look of furtive terror, which was so often to be met with in the eyes of the timid these days, crept into her wrinkled face.

“Well, citizeness,” Chauvelin rejoined quietly, “why don’t you proceed?  That awful house, you were saying.  Where and what is that awful house of which you speak?”

“The place kept by citizen Leridan, just by Bassin de l’Ourcq,” the woman murmured.  “You know it, citizen.”

Chauvelin nodded.  He was beginning to understand.

“Well, now, tell me,” he said, with that bland patience which had so oft served him in good stead in his unavowable profession.  “Tell me.  Last year citizen Marat adopted—­we’ll say adopted—­a child, whom he placed in the Leridans’ house on the Pantin road.  Is that correct?”

“That is just how it is, citizen.  And I—­”

“One moment,” he broke in somewhat more sternly, as the woman’s garrulity was getting on his nerves.  “As you say, I know the Leridans’ house.  I have had cause to send children there myself.  Children of aristos or of fat bourgeois, whom it was our duty to turn into good citizens.  They are not pampered there, I imagine,” he went on drily; “and if citizen Marat sent his—­er—­adopted son there, it was not with a view to having him brought up as an aristo, what?”

“The child was not to be brought up at all,” the woman said gruffly.  “I have often heard citizen Marat say that he hoped the brat would prove a thief when he grew up, and would take to alcoholism like a duck takes to water.”

“And you know nothing of the child’s parents?”

“Nothing, citizen.  I had to go to Pantin once a month and have a look at him and report to citizen Marat.  But I always had the same tale to tell.  The child was looking more and more like a young reprobate every time I saw him.”