food to keep them through the day; and at night patronize the “twopenny rope,” one with another, in a wretched room containing five or six beds, some of which are always engaged by men, as male lodgers are by far the most abundant.  Yes; and in spite of the disgust that a poor and virtuous girl must feel at this arrangement, she must submit to it; for a lodging-house keeper cannot have separate rooms for females.  To furnish a room, however meanly, the poor workwoman must possess three or four shillings in ready money.  But how save this sum, out of weekly earnings of a couple of florins, which are scarcely sufficient to keep her from starving, and are still less sufficient to clothe her?  No! no!  The poor wretch must resign herself to this repugnant cohabitation; and so, gradually, the instinct of modesty becomes weakened; the natural sentiment of chastity, that saved her from the “gay life,” becomes extinct; vice appears to be the only means of improving her intolerable condition; she yields; and the first “man made of money,” who can afford a governess for his children, cries out against the depravity of the lower orders!  And yet, painful as the condition of the working woman is, it is relatively fortunate.  Should work fail her for one day, two days, what then?  Should sickness come—­sickness almost always occasioned by unwholesome food, want of fresh air, necessary attention, and good rest; sickness, often so enervating as to render work impossible; though not so dangerous as to procure the sufferer a bed in an hospital—­what becomes of the hapless wretches then?  The mind hesitates, and shrinks from dwelling on such gloomy pictures.

This inadequacy of wages, one terrible source only of so many evils, and often of so many vices, is general, especially among women; and, again this is not private wretchedness, but the wretchedness which afflicts whole classes, the type of which we endeavor to develop in Mother Bunch.  It exhibits the moral and physical condition of thousands of human creatures in Paris, obliged to subsist on a scanty four shillings a week.  This poor workwoman, then, notwithstanding the advantages she unknowingly enjoyed through Agricola’s generosity, lived very miserably; and her health, already shattered, was now wholly undermined by these constant hardships.  Yet, with extreme delicacy, though ignorant of the little sacrifice already made for her by Agricola, Mother Bunch pretended she earned more than she really did, in order to avoid offers of service which it would have pained her to accept, because she knew the limited means of Frances and her son, and because it would have wounded her natural delicacy, rendered still more sensitive by so many sorrows and humiliations.

But, singular as it may appear, this deformed body contained a loving and generous soul—­a mind cultivated even to poetry; and let us add, that this was owing to the example of Agricola Baudoin, with whom she had been brought up, and who had naturally the gift.  This poor girl was the first confidant to whom our young mechanic imparted his literary essays; and when he told her of the charm and extreme relief he found in poetic reverie, after a day of hard toil, the workwoman, gifted with strong natural intelligence, felt, in her turn, how great a resource this would be to her in her lonely and despised condition.