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Paris was wild with excitement for a dozen hours, which is about as long as its fevers last, and the two of them, father and son, went straight away to a famous Cardinal then staying in Paris, and he, by the way, was in the church when the Abbe publicly confessed himself Cardinal Bonpre " "Ah!" interrupted Patoux excitedly, "This interests me!
Pierre Midon stared at the action. "What ails thee, Jean?" he asked brusquely, "Hast thou remembered a dead sin, or a passing soul?" "Neither," replied Patoux slowly, "But only just the thought of another child a waif and stray whom the good Cardinal found in the streets of Rouen, outside our great Cathedral door.
Martine, breathless, dishevelled, laughing and sobbing alternately, tried to speak, but could only gesticulate and throw up her hands in a kind of ecstasy, but whether of despair or joy could not be guessed. Madame Patoux shook her by the arm. "Martine! speak what is it!" Martine made a violent effort. "Fabien! Fabien " she gasped, flinging herself to and fro and still sobbing and laughing.
Papa Patoux, quite satisfied with his own reasoning, continued his supper in an amiable state of mind.
Madame Patoux felt as though the heavens had suddenly opened to let the angels down. Was this Fabien? Fabien, who had hobbled painfully upon crutches all his life, and had left her house in his usual condition an hour or so ago? This straight-limbed child, running with the graceful and easy movement of a creature who had never known a day's pain?
"What didst thou serve to Monseigneur, my little one?" he asked his wife with a coaxing and caressing air, as though she were some delicate and dainty sylph of the woodlands, instead of being the lady of massive proportions which she undoubtedly was, "Something of delicacy and fine flavour, doubtless?" Madame Patoux shook her head despondingly.
Here she broke off her soliloquy as the children came up, Babette eagerly demanding to know where the Cardinal was. Madame Patoux set her arms akimbo and surveyed the little group of three half- pityingly, half derisively.
Thus enjoined, Papa Patoux kissed his children affectionately, signing the cross on their brows as they came up to him in turn, after the fashion of his own father, who had continued this custom up to his dying day.
"Poor little miserable monster!" exclaimed Madame Patoux, as she peered into the pot where the soup for the Cardinal's supper was simmering "He is arranging himself to become a thief or a murderer, be sure of that, Henri! and thou, who art trained in all thy holy duties by the good Pere Laurent, who teaches thee everything which the school is not wise enough to teach, ought never to listen to such wickedness.
Puzzled beyond measure at the strange state of mind in which he found himself, Felix Bonpre went over and over again all the events of the day in order, his arrival in Rouen, his visit to the Cathedral, and the grand music he had heard or fancied he heard there, his experience with the sceptical little Patoux children and their mother, his conversation with the Archbishop, in which he had felt much more excitement than he was willing to admit, his dream wherein he had been so painfully impressed with a sense of the desertion, emptiness, and end of the world, and finally his discovery of the little lonely and apparently forsaken boy, thrown despairingly as it were against the closed Cathedral, like a frail human wreck cast up from the gulf of the devouring sea.
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