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But I had the bright idea of filling a large cloth sack with this short straw, which I placed in a barn and slept on covered by my cloak; thus avoiding the vermin with which the beds and the rooms were infested. In the morning I emptied the sack and put it in the coach and each evening I refilled it so that I had a clean palliasse. Don Raphael followed my example.
And that night too, that terrible night, when in a room of horror I beheld a mother who had just killed herself with her five little ones, she lying on a palliasse suckling her last-born, and two little girls, two pretty little blondes, sleeping the last sleep beside her, while the two boys had succumbed farther away, one of them crouching against a wall, and the other lying upon the floor, distorted as though by a last effort to avoid death!... O Holy Father!
The money burned my fingers, for I knew that his pension was not a very large one; and yet, since I could not avoid taking it, there was no denying that it was exceedingly useful. Out I sallied and spent sixteen shillings of it upon a new palliasse which should go under the straw mattress upon my bed.
Vagualame slipped his hand, spare and delicately formed, under the counterpane. "Little idiot!" he exclaimed in a satisfied tone. "She has not even hidden it inside the mattress! She has just slipped it in between the palliasse, and the hair mattress on top why, she's a child!" He drew out two envelopes and eagerly read the addresses.
There was Sarah, too sick to see anything but the bed, to undress, to make fomentations for, to coax to mouthfuls of tea and toast. There was Jerry to feed and send off, with the warmest of hugs, to share Tom Ocock's palliasse. There were the children ... well, Polly's first plan had been to put them straight to bed. But when she came to peel off their little trousers she changed her mind.
All its comfort seemed, however, to give no great delight to Videy, the cashier and female financier-general of the Lovell family, who, in a state of absorbed untidiness, sitting at the end of the tent upon a palliasse covered with a counterpane of quilted cloth of every hue, was evidently occupied in calculating her father's profits and losses at the recent horse-fair.
Elbows on knees and head on fist, she sat buried in thought; then turning to her old lover sitting on the palliasse, she asked: "What do you think of it all, Maurice?" "I think these good gentry give a philosopher and an amateur of the shows of life abundant matter for reflection and amusement; but that it would be better for you, my dear, if you were out of France."
Mole had once more turned over on his palliasse and, apparently, had gone to sleep. Hebert, with a strange and puzzled laugh, followed his chief out of the cell. At first Chauvelin had the wish to go back and see the Public Prosecutor to speak with him to tell him what? Yes, what?
In consequence of the prosperity of the straw trade, which lasted from 1818 to 1825, luxury spread throughout the country; and it would excite a smile, were it not a subject for regret, to observe the country folks in embroidered stockings and pumps, with large velvet bonnets trimmed with feathers and lace; but in their homes they, as well as the artisans in the towns, are miserably off; and they who are even genteelly dressed when abroad, have rarely more than a miserable palliasse for a bed at home.
After the constables had retired to their quarters I took my palliasse downstairs to the day-room, and laid it on two forms alongside two six-foot tables which were placed end to end in the centre of the room."
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