第99章

THE SISTER OF THE BACCHANAL QUEEN.

The person who now entered was a girl of about eighteen, short, and very much deformed.Though not exactly a hunchback, her spine was curved; her breast was sunken, and her head deeply set in the shoulders.Her face was regular, but long, thin, very pale, and pitted with the small pox;

yet it expressed great sweetness and melancholy.Her blue eyes beamed with kindness and intelligence.By a strange freak of nature, the handsomest woman would have been proud of the magnificent hair twisted in a coarse net at the back of her head.She held an old basket in her hand.Though miserably clad, the care and neatness of her dress revealed a powerful struggle with her poverty.Notwithstanding the cold, she wore a scanty frock made of print of an indefinable color, spotted with white;

but it had been so often washed, that its primitive design and color had long since disappeared.In her resigned, yet suffering face, might be read a long familiarity with every form of suffering, every description of taunting.From her birth, ridicule had ever pursued her.We have said that she was very deformed, and she was vulgarly called "Mother Bunch." Indeed it was so usual to give her this grotesque name, which every moment reminded her of her infirmity, that Frances and Agricola, though they felt as much compassion as other people showed contempt for her, never called her, however, by any other name.

Mother Bunch, as we shall therefore call her in future, was born in the house in which Dagobert's wife had resided for more than twenty years;

and she had, as it were, been brought up with Agricola and Gabriel.

There are wretches fatally doomed to misery.Mother Bunch had a very pretty sister, on whom Perrine Soliveau, their common mother, the widow of a ruined tradesman, had concentrated all her affection, while she treated her deformed child with contempt and unkindness.The latter would often come, weeping, to Frances, on this account, who tried to console her, and in the long evenings amused her by teaching her to read and sew.Accustomed to pity her by their mother's example, instead of imitating other children, who always taunted and sometimes even beat her, Agricola and Gabriel liked her, and used to protect and defend her.

She was about fifteen, and her sister Cephyse was about seventeen, when their mother died, leaving them both in utter poverty.Cephyse was intelligent, active, clever, but different to her sister; she had the lively, alert, hoydenish character which requires air, exercise and pleasures--a good girl enough, but foolishly spoiled by her mother.

Cephyse, listening at first to Frances's good advice, resigned herself to her lot; and, having learnt to sew, worked like her sister, for about a year.But, unable to endure any longer the bitter privations her insignificant earnings, notwithstanding her incessant toil, exposed her to--privations which often bordered on starvation--Cephyse, young, pretty, of warm temperament, and surrounded by brilliant offers and seductions--brilliant, indeed, for her, since they offered food to satisfy her hunger, shelter from the cold, and decent raiment, without being obliged to work fifteen hours a day in an obscure and unwholesome hovel--Cephyse listened to the vows of a young lawyer's clerk, who forsook her soon after.She formed a connection with another clerk, whom she (instructed by the examples set her), forsook in turn for a bagman, whom she afterwards cast off for other favorites.In a word, what with changing and being forsaken, Cephyse, in the course of one or two years, was the idol of a set of grisettes, students and clerks; and acquired such a reputation at the balls on the Hampstead Heaths of Paris, by her decision of character, original turn of mind, and unwearied ardor in all kinds of pleasures, and especially her wild, noisy gayety, that she was termed the Bacchanal Queen, and proved herself in every way worthy of this bewildering royalty.

From that time poor Mother Bunch only heard of her sister at rare intervals.She still mourned for her, and continued to toil hard to gain her three-and-six a week.The unfortunate girl, having been taught sewing by Frances, made coarse shirts for the common people and the army.

For these she received half-a-crown a dozen.They had to be hemmed, stitched, provided with collars and wristbands, buttons, and button-

holes; and at the most, when at work twelve and fifteen hours a day, she rarely succeeded in turning out more than fourteen or sixteen shirts a week--an excessive amount of toil that brought her in about three shillings and fourpence a week.And the case of this poor girl was neither accidental nor uncommon.And this, because the remuneration given for women's work is an example of revolting injustice and savage barbarism.They are paid not half as much as men who are employed at the needle: such as tailors, and makers of gloves, or waistcoats, etc.--no doubt because women can work as well as men--because they are more weak and delicate--and because their need may be twofold as great when they become mothers.

Well, Mother Bunch fagged on, with three-and-four a week.That is to say, toiling hard for twelve or fifteen hours every day; she succeeded in keeping herself alive, in spite of exposure to hunger, cold, and poverty-

-so numerous were her privations.Privations? No! The word privation expresses but weakly that constant and terrible want of all that is necessary to preserve the existence God gives; namely, wholesome air and shelter, sufficient and nourishing food and warm clothing.Mortification would be a better word to describe that total want of all that is essentially vital, which a justly organized state of society ought--yes--

ought necessarily to bestow on every active, honest workman and workwoman, since civilization has dispossessed them of all territorial right, and left them no other patrimony than their hands.