“We were children, Camillo and I,” she said at length, “in keep of an ill woman we called Maman Trebuchet, and in a house near the entrance of a court leading off the Rue de la Madeleine and close beside the Market.  How we had come there we never inquired. . . .  I suppose all children take such things as they find them.  The house was of five storys, all let out in tenements, and we inhabited two rooms on the fourth floor to the left as you went up the staircase. . . .  Some of the men quarrelled with their wives and beat them.  There was always a noise of quarrelling in the house:  but outside, before the front door, the men who were not beating their women would sit for hours together and smoke and spit and tell one another stories against the Church and against women.  The pavement where they sat and the street before it were strewn always with rotting odds and ends of vegetables, for almost every one in that quarter earned his living by the Market, and Maman Trebuchet among the rest.  She divided her time between walking the streets with a basket and drinking the profits away in the cabarets, and in the intervals she cursed and beat us.  We lived for the most part on the refuse she brought home at night—­ on so much of her stock as had found no purchaser—­and we played about the gutters and alleys of the Market.  So far as I remember we were neither very happy nor yet very miserable.  We knew that we were brother and sister, and that Maman Trebuchet was not our real mother.  Beyond this we were not inquisitive, but took life as we found it.

“Nevertheless, I know now that we were not altogether lost, but that eyes in Brussels were watching us; though how far they were friendly I cannot tell you.  I think sometimes that the agents of the Genoese, who had hidden us there, must have been playing their own game as well as their masters’.  There was, for example, a dark man who often visited the Market:  he called himself a lay-brother, and seemed to be busy with religious work among the poor of the quarter.  We knew him as Maitre Antoine at first, and so he was generally called:  but he told us that his real name was Antonio—­or Antoniu, as he spoke it—­and that he came from Italy.  He took a great fancy to us and obtained leave of Maman Trebuchet to teach us the Scriptures:  but what he really taught us was to speak with him in Italian.  We did not know at the time that, though he called it Tuscan, he was all the while teaching us our own Corsican.  Nor, I believe, did our guardian know this; but one day, finding out by chance that we knew Italian (for we had begun to talk it together, that she might not understand what we said) and discovering how we had picked it up, she flew into a dreadful rage, lay in wait next day to catch Maitre Antoine as he came up the stairs, and fell upon him with such fury that the poor man fled out of the house and we never saw him again.