“You must not think me a bad daughter, monsieur,” said she, “because I’m so pleased to leave home.  Papa still works as much as he is able, though he does not get much reward for it at the factory.  And mamma does all she can at home, though she hasn’t much strength left her nowadays.  Since Victor came back from the army, he has married and has children of his own, and I’m even afraid that he’ll have more than he can provide for, as, while he was in the army, he seems to have lost all taste for work.  But the sharpest of the family is that lazy-bones Irma, my younger sister, who’s so pretty and so delicate-looking, perhaps because she’s always ill.  As you may remember, mamma used to fear that Irma might turn out badly like Norine.  Well, not at all!  Indeed, she’s the only one of us who is likely to do well, for she’s going to marry a clerk in the post-office.  And so the only ones left at home are myself and Alfred.  Oh! he is a perfect bandit!  That is the plain truth.  He committed a theft the other day, and one had no end of trouble to get him out of the hands of the police commissary.  But all the same, mamma has a weakness for him, and lets him take all my earnings.  Yes, indeed, I’ve had quite enough of him, especially as he is always terrifying me out of my wits, threatening to beat and even kill me, though he well knows that ever since my illness the slightest noise throws me into a faint.  And as, all considered, neither papa nor mamma needs me, it’s quite excusable, isn’t it, that I should prefer living quietly alone.  It is my right, is it not, monsieur?”

She went on to speak of her sister Euphrasie, who had fallen into a most wretched condition, said she, ever since passing through Dr. Gaude’s hands.  Her home had virtually been broken up, she had become decrepit, a mere bundle of rags, unable even to handle a broom.  It made one tremble to see her.  Then, after a pause, just as the cab was reaching the Rue Caroline, the girl continued:  “Will you come up to see her?  You might say a few kind words to her.  It would please me, for I’m going on a rather unpleasant errand.  I thought that she would have strength enough to make some little boxes like me, and thus earn a few pence for herself; but she has kept the work I gave her more than a month now, and if she really cannot do it I must take it back.”

Mathieu consented, and in the room upstairs he beheld one of the most frightful, poignant spectacles that he had ever witnessed.  In the centre of that one room where the family slept and ate, Euphrasie sat on a straw-bottomed chair; and although she was barely thirty years of age, one might have taken her for a little old woman of fifty; so thin and so withered did she look that she resembled one of those fruits, suddenly deprived of sap, that dry up on the tree.  Her teeth had fallen, and of her hair she only retained a few white locks.  But the more characteristic mark of this mature senility was a wonderful loss of muscular strength, an almost complete disappearance of will, energy, and power of action, so that she now spent whole days, idle, stupefied, without courage even to raise a finger.